Notifications and spam

By default a submission lands in your submissions inbox and waits for you to look. Notifications tell you about it instead. You set them up under the form's Actions tab in the form builder.

Email notifications

An email notification sends you a message every time someone submits the form. It includes the values the visitor entered, so you can often read the whole inquiry without logging in.

Give it the address that should be told. For most small businesses that is a shared address like info@ or inquiries@ so more than one person sees it. You can send to more than one recipient if several people need to know.

Points worth knowing:

• The notification is a copy. The submission is still stored in your inbox even if the email goes missing.
• Notification emails come from BrightSite, not from the person who filled in the form. Replying to the notification will not reach them. Copy their address out of the submission and start a new email.
• Check your spam folder the first time you test, and mark it as not spam so future ones arrive properly.

Webhook notifications

A webhook sends the submission to another system automatically. When someone submits the form, BrightSite sends the data to a web address you provide. That system then does whatever it does: adds a row to a spreadsheet, creates a lead in a CRM, posts a message into a team chat.

You need a destination address to point at. That comes from the other system, not from BrightSite. Most automation tools give you one when you create a trigger.

If you have no idea what a webhook is, you do not need one. Email notifications cover most businesses. Webhooks are for when you want submissions to appear somewhere else without anyone copying them across by hand.

Testing a webhook

You can send a test to your webhook from the Actions tab without waiting for a real submission. The test sends sample data to the address you entered so you can confirm the connection works and see the shape of the data on the other end.

Test before you rely on it. A webhook pointed at the wrong address fails quietly, and the first sign is usually a customer asking why nobody got back to them.

Publish your changes

Notification settings are part of the form, so they follow the same rule as everything else. Change them, then publish the form. Until you publish, the live form keeps using the previous settings.

Spam

Any form on a public website will eventually get automated junk. It is not a sign of a problem with your site.

BrightSite filters obvious automated submissions before they reach you. Some still get through, because filtering too hard would start blocking real people, which is far worse.

What to do about the ones that arrive:

• Select them in the submissions inbox and delete them in bulk. It takes seconds.
• Do not click links in a spam submission or reply to it.
• If you are getting a lot, consider whether a field could be doing more work. A dropdown asking what someone is inquiring about is easier for a person to answer sensibly than for a bot.
• Fewer fields means more real submissions but also more junk. That trade-off is usually worth it.

If spam ever becomes overwhelming rather than annoying, get in touch rather than turning the form off.