In this article, you will learn how Form Publisher sends the email notifications with your documents generated by merging your form submission answers over your template (Google Docs, Sheets or Slides).

When are the email notifications sent?

Form Publisher sends these email notifications each time a response to your Google Form is submitted. It then generates documents by replacing markers from your document template with the form responses.

Form Publisher also sends notifications when the generated documents are passed through an approval workflow.

In your Google Drive, we store these documents in the specific folder you have configured as Form Publisher’s output folder.

By default, we notify your recipients with these generated documents - send PDFs as an attachment or share the files in Drive with the configured permission for them to view, edit or comment on.

From whom and to whom are these emails sent?

We send these notifications from your Google account if you are the owner of the Google Form. You are the owner of all documents generated by Form Publisher.

Your email recipients are the email addresses you entered in the Sharing options and notifications sidebar from Form Publisher.

How are your email notifications sent?

By way of the permissions you granted for Form Publisher during installation, it uses Gmail API to access your Gmail mailbox and to send the email notifications from there, on your behalf. To achieve this, Form Publisher performs the following steps:

1. Form Publisher sends an instruction to ‘send email(s)’ to Gmail

Just like the steps you would follow to send your emails in Gmail, Google provides a solution to automate the process programmatically, using Gmail API. And that’s precisely what Form Publisher is doing: We automate a series of actions that can be done manually.

With your grant of the specific permission to Send email as you, Form Publisher uses your Google account to send a particular instruction to Gmail (i.e.: 'Send an email'). Technically, it's as if you were the one sending this request.

In other words, Form Publisher only fetches data from your Google Form and transfers it to Gmail / Google servers for sending those emails.

The links to the generated documents (PDF & the files in the Drive) are sent as part of this instruction.

2. Gmail gets the instruction and sends your emails

After getting Form Publisher’s instruction, Gmail will send an email with your Google account to all recipients mentioned in the Sharing options and notifications sidebar, as if you were sending them manually from Gmail interface. Gmail is still the core tool that sends and delivers your notification.

Which technology do we use to send your email notifications?

Form Publisher relies entirely on Google Apps Script technology. By using Google Apps Script, all the Form Publisher code is based and executed in Google servers. All your data is stored and processed in the Google Cloud.

That means that we don't have any email servers ourselves. Instead, we rely on the Gmail API to send emails.

All your emails are sent from your own Google account to your recipients, and only via Google servers.

What happens to my emails after notifications are sent?

Once Gmail sends your emails to your recipients, all your emails are stored in your Gmail box. At no point in time does Form Publisher store any copies of your emails or its contents.