Auto-reply

What it is

The auto-reply is optional and set per form. It is off unless you turn it on. While it is off, only the site owner and the recipients you add are notified, and the visitor gets no email.

It is an acknowledgement to the visitor, not a delivery channel. It never changes whether a lead counts as delivered, and a problem with it never touches the lead.

Before you turn it on

• The site’s spam check must be on and working. The reply goes to an address a stranger typed, so it goes only to visitors who passed the site’s own Turnstile check. Set it up first: spam protection.
• Write a subject and a message. The subject can be up to 120 characters and the message up to 2,000 characters, in plain text.
• The form needs an email field. The reply goes to the address in the first field called email, email_address, your_email, mail, contact_email, _replyto, replyto, reply_to, reply-to that holds exactly one plain address.
• A reply address. A visitor who replies writes to the form's first confirmed recipient, or to your own sign-in address when the form has none. It is never the visitor’s own address.

Writing the message

The only placeholder is {{name}}, which becomes the visitor’s name from a field called name, full name, your name, contact name, first name, fname, given name. The name is cleaned first: markup, links, digits and symbols are removed and it is cut to 40 characters. When the form has no usable name, {{name}} and the space before it are left out, so write Hi {{name}},, which then reads “Hi,”, rather than a greeting that needs a name. Any other text in double braces is refused when you save.

The dashboard shows a preview built by the same code that builds the email, with a sample name.

Links

A link in your subject or message may only point to the client’s own domain (the site’s domain or one of its subdomains). Any other web address, any email address and any bare domain such as another-site.example is refused when you save. The rule errs on the side of refusing, so it can also catch text such as Mon.Fri; add a space. A site with no domain set cannot have links at all. The text is checked again before every send.

What every email carries

• A line saying why the person got it: “You are getting this because your email address was entered in a form on your site”, and that they can ignore it if it was not them.
• On the Free plan every auto-reply ends with a “Sent via FormParcel” line. Starter and Agency auto-replies do not.
• A sender address that is separate from the one that sends owner emails.

Limits

An auto-reply emails strangers, so it has limits that protect them and the sending reputation of every customer. They count over a rolling day, and these are the current defaults.

The domain limits do not apply to free mailbox providers such as Gmail, which share one domain between many people. An address is counted in a canonical form, so a +tag on any address, or dots in a Gmail address, do not get around the limit. An auto-reply over a limit is skipped, never retried and never saved for tomorrow, and the lead is unaffected.

When a reply is skipped

The receipt of every lead on a form with the auto-reply on has an auto-reply line: Sent, Skipped (with the reason), Failed or Queued. A reply is skipped when:

• the lead was a test lead from the dashboard;
• the lead has no usable email address, or that address bounced or reported spam before;
• the site’s spam check is off or not working, or could not be made for this lead (the lead was accepted unchecked);
• a limit above was reached;
• the form was paused or archived, the account is being deleted, or you turned the auto-reply off before it was sent;
• the lead’s content was deleted before the reply went out;
• the text has a link that does not lead to the client’s site;
• the lead was counted past the plan's monthly limit, which pauses its auto-reply;
• it could not be sent within 12 hours, after which it is not sent at all.

The receipt does not name another customer’s activity: a limit counted across FormParcel only says that a daily limit was reached.

What FormParcel keeps

While the email waits to be sent, the visitor’s address and greeting name are kept encrypted. Once it has been sent or skipped they are deleted, along with the text. The keyed hashes that count an address and its domain against the limits are cleared 48 hours later. Deleting a lead’s content cancels a reply that has not been sent. See the privacy policy.