Testing Your Notifications

Nothing is more frustrating than finding out a notification never arrived — after the responses you cared about came in. This guide shows how to verify your setup end to end in under a minute, and explains the automatic checks that catch the most common delivery problems while you're still setting up.

Send a test email

Every notification has a Send test button — open the notification, click Edit notification (top right), and find Send a test. You can deliver the test to:

• My inbox — sends a sample to your own email address. This is the quickest check that your subject, message, and merge tags look right.
• The saved recipients — sends the same sample to the recipients configured on the notification's delivery rules: the complete journey your real notifications will take, ending in the same inboxes.

The test email uses placeholder answers (the first choice of each question, or a sample phrase) so your merge tags render with realistic content — no form submission is created, and nothing appears in your submissions history. A banner at the top marks it clearly as a test.

Tests are sent from your Google account through the exact same channel as live notifications. That's deliberate: if a test arrives, live notifications will too.

Recipients from form answers are skipped in tests. Rules that send to the respondent or to an email address answered in the form need a real submission to know the address — a test has none. Test those by submitting the form once yourself.

The recipient address check

When you add recipients to a delivery rule, Form Notifications quietly checks each address's domain (the part after the @) against public DNS: does this domain exist, and can it receive email at all?

If a domain can't receive mail — because it doesn't exist, is misspelled, or has no mail service — you'll see a warning right in the rule editor:

⚠️ Mail to examle.com can't be delivered — the domain doesn't exist or has no mail service. Check for typos.

This catches the most silent failure in email: a typo'd domain. The message would be handed to Google without error and reported as Sent, but it can never arrive, and the only trace is a bounce in the sender's inbox that's easy to miss.

The warning is advisory — you can still save the rule. Some internal company domains only resolve inside their own network, so a warning on an address you know works can be safely ignored.

A recommended pre-launch routine

1. Create your notification and add its delivery rules.
2. Send a test to my inbox — check the subject, message, and merge tags.
3. Send a test to the saved recipients — ask one recipient to confirm it arrived.
4. Submit the form once yourself — this exercises the real trigger, plus any conditions and respondent/form-field recipients.

If all three emails arrived, your setup is verified end to end.

When a test doesn't arrive

• Check spam first — a recipient's filter may hold the first message from a new sender.
• Recipient domain warning showing? Fix the typo in the address.
• Nothing in your own inbox either, even spam? Your email provider may be rejecting mail that Google sends for your address — see when your domain blocks Google-sent mail.
• Conditions on the rule? A test to recipients ignores conditions, but real submissions don't — make sure your test submission actually matches them.
• Still stuck? See troubleshooting or contact us.