Formie and Freeform notifications on your phone (Craft CMS)

How do Formie and Freeform send notifications?

Both send their email notifications through Craft's own email settings, so if Craft can't send email reliably, neither form plugin can. Each lets you write notification emails per form, but the sending itself is Craft's job.

In Formie, open a form and go to its Email Notifications tab. Each notification has recipient emails (or recipient conditions), a From Name, From Email and Reply-To Email, and a content editor where you insert submitted values with the variable picker. There's a preview and a Send Test Email button. Formie sends notifications through Craft's queue, so a queue that isn't running means emails that never leave.

In Freeform, open the form builder's Notifications tab and add an Admin notification with the addresses that should receive each submission. The notification templates themselves live under Freeform → Notifications, where you set the subject, From and Reply-To. Freeform's documentation is firm that, if you use SMTP, the From Email must match the address in Craft's email settings exactly, or messages are more likely to be filtered as spam.

Both plugins can also email the visitor a copy. In Freeform that's an Email Fields notification, sent to the address the visitor typed in; in Formie it's another notification addressed to the email field. The same rule applies to both: send from your own domain and never from the visitor's address, which receiving servers treat as forged.

How to set up Craft's email so notifications arrive

Go to Settings → Email in the control panel, choose a transport that sends through a real mail service, and press Test. Craft has three built-in transport types: Gmail, SMTP and Sendmail. Craft's own documentation says Sendmail "tends to be extremely unreliable", so a site still on it is the first suspect when notifications go missing.

The Gmail transport sends through an existing Google account. It can do for a small site, but it ties the website's email to one person's mailbox and password, which is awkward when that person leaves or the account's security settings change. The same screen has an optional Reply-To Address for system email if nobody reads the sending address.

The better choices are SMTP with a transactional mail provider, or an adapter plugin from the Plugin Store for a service such as Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or SendGrid. Choosing a provider and the general SMTP ideas are the same as on WordPress, covered in How to set up SMTP for WordPress contact forms.

1. 1

   Set the System Email Address

   In Settings → Email, use an address on your own domain, such as [email protected], not a Gmail or Outlook address.

2. 2

   Choose the transport

   Pick SMTP and enter your provider's server details, or install your provider's adapter plugin and choose it instead of Sendmail.

3. 3

   Keep secrets out of the database

   Put the password or API key in your .env file and reference it as an environment variable in the setting.

4. 4

   Press Test

   Craft sends a message with the new settings. Check it arrives, and that it isn't in spam.

5. 5

   Match the From addresses

   Make each Formie or Freeform notification send from the same domain as the System Email Address, and put the visitor's address in Reply-To.

If every notification goes to the same developer's address whatever the form says, check for Craft's testToEmailAddress setting, often set through the CRAFT_TEST_TO_EMAIL_ADDRESS environment variable. It sends all system email to one address for testing, and it's easy to carry over from a staging site by mistake.

If the test arrives but notifications land in spam, your domain's DNS records are the usual cause. SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain English explains what to add for your mail provider.

How can you tell whether a notification was sent?

Formie keeps a record of every email notification it sends, and Freeform can email you when one fails. Between them and Craft's queue, you can usually find where a missing email stopped.

• Formie's Sent Notifications show exactly what was sent, to whom, and details such as the transport type. You can resend one to the original recipient or to new addresses, singly or in bulk.

• Freeform's email alerts are under Freeform → Settings → Notices & Alerts. Add your address to "Send Email Alerts for Failed Notifications". Solspace notes these alerts can't catch every possible failure.

• Craft's queue is under Utilities → Queue Manager, and failed jobs also show in the control panel's sidebar. Craft's runQueueAutomatically setting, on by default, runs waiting jobs when someone visits the control panel, so on a quiet site they can sit until somebody logs in. Craft recommends running php craft queue/listen as a background process or scheduled task instead.

A notification missing from Sent Notifications, with a job stuck in the queue, points at the queue. One that was sent but never arrived points at the mail provider or DNS. Most transactional mail providers keep their own log of each message, with the receiving server's reply, which settles the question. Craft's own log files, in the project's storage/logs folder, record errors from the mailer and the queue if you need to go further.

How do you get Formie and Freeform submissions on your phone?

Both plugins can post submissions straight to a messaging app, and both can pass them to an automation tool that reaches almost anything else. Keep email as the record. A phone alert is what gets an enquiry answered while the customer is still deciding.

In Formie, integrations are set up once in Formie's settings and then switched on in each form's Integrations tab. In Freeform they're added under Freeform → Integrations and then enabled in each form's settings. Automation tools often mean another subscription and another account to look after, so the built-in Slack and Telegram routes are simpler if your team already uses them.

Before choosing, decide who needs the alert and how quickly. A shared Slack or Telegram group suits a small office where whoever is free picks it up, while a tradesperson on site is better served by something that buzzes their own phone (and texts cost money for every message). Formie's recipient conditions and Freeform's conditional notifications can still send the email copy to the right department. For Slack and Teams in more depth, see Send website form submissions to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Is there a Craft plugin that sends alerts straight to your phone?

Formcrier sends each submission to your phone on WhatsApp, a text, Telegram, Slack or Microsoft Teams, and its Craft plugin adds it as an integration in both Formie (Formie → Settings → Integrations → Miscellaneous) and Freeform (Freeform → Settings → Integrations → Webhooks). It needs Craft 5, sends from Craft's queue with automatic retries, never sends spam, and works on every plan, including Free. The plugin isn't in the Craft Plugin Store yet: email [email protected] for early access, or use the Formcrier script, which works with both form plugins. See Formie, Freeform and the Craft CMS docs.