# Where submissions go

> Each form's own Submissions tab: emails to you and back to the sender, webhooks to everything else, and why a form with nowhere to send will not publish.
>
> From the MightyBuilder documentation: https://docs.mightybuilder.ai/forms/where-submissions-go

Wherever you tell it to. Nothing is kept on your site.

## The Submissions tab

Open a form and it has a **Submissions** tab. Everything about where that form's
messages go is on it, in two parts: **Emails** and **Webhooks**.

It belongs to the form rather than to the site, because "where do these go" is a
question about one form. A careers form and a contact form usually want different
answers, and a form you have just built should be able to say what happens to it
without you going looking elsewhere.

The cost, stated plainly: if two forms feed the same place, you set that place up
twice.

## Emails

The usual answer, and a new form starts with one addressed to you. A submission
arrives formatted so the answers are readable rather than dumped as a blob.

**Replying to that email reaches the person who sent it.** The reply-to is set to
whatever address they gave you, so answering an enquiry is answering an email —
there is no "log in to respond" step. If they gave no address there is nothing to
reply to, and the email says so rather than looking like it worked.

**Send to** is one box and takes as many addresses as you like, separated by
commas. Three kinds of thing can go in it, and they can sit side by side:

- **An address, typed** — you, a colleague, a shared inbox.
- **`{{site_email}}`** — your own address, the one on your account. This is what
  a new form starts with, and it is a tag rather than a copy on purpose: change
  the address on your account and every form follows, instead of twenty forms
  going on mailing a mailbox nobody reads.
- **`{{field:email}}`** — whoever filled the form in, read out of the form's own
  email question. This is the confirmation email: the person gets a copy of what
  they sent.

The **{{ }} button** beside the box inserts one of those. Beside an address box
it offers only the tags that *are* an address; beside the subject and the message
it offers everything — the form's own questions, the time it was sent, the page
it came from. The questions come from the form's published markup, so a form you
have not published yet offers the general tags and none of its own.

Each email has its own subject and message.

Leave the message empty and the email carries every answer in the standard
layout. Write something and it replaces them, which is how you get "a new enquiry
arrived" without the enquiry in the email.

## Webhooks

The other half of the tab: a web address each submission is POSTed to. This is
how a submission reaches a spreadsheet, a CRM, a chat channel or anything else
that accepts one. If you use Zapier, Make or n8n, their "webhook" is exactly
this — paste the address they give you and every submission arrives there as it
happens.

For something with a shape of its own — Slack and Discord both — choose **Custom
body** and write it yourself, with the same tags the emails use.

You can add several of each. They all fire, so one submission can reach your
inbox, the sender and your CRM at once.

## A form with nowhere to send will not publish

If nothing on the Submissions tab can actually receive a message, **publishing is
refused** and says which form. That is deliberate and it is the one refusal worth
having: nothing is stored here, so a live form with nowhere to send accepts a
message, thanks the sender and loses it — and the sender does not know, so they
will not try again.

Two ways out, and each is one action: give the form somewhere to send, or disable
the form.

## Nothing is stored here

**There is no copy of a submission on your site.** It is delivered and that is
all — the email or the address you pointed at is the record, not this.

The honest consequence: if you delete the email, it is gone. That is the same
as any other message somebody sends you, and it is why a destination you
actually read matters more than one that looks tidy.

A delivery that fails is retried for a while before it is given up on, so a
receiver being briefly down does not lose anything.

## Changes need a publish

An address you add starts receiving at your **next publish**, like everything
else about your site. Until then it is a draft, which is what stops a half-typed
address collecting real enquiries.

## Spam

Every form carries a guard that stops the bulk of automated submissions without
asking a human to prove anything. There is no puzzle to solve and no third-party
widget on your page.

Something caught by that guard is not delivered. Everything else is, including
anything merely unusual — an over-long answer, or a field renamed while somebody
was typing — because a real person's message is worth more than a tidy inbox.

## What forms cannot do yet

Stated plainly, because finding out after you have promised a customer is worse:

- **No file attachments.** A form cannot take a CV or a photograph.
- **No payments.** Nothing to charge a card with.
- **No accounts or logins**, so no "check the status of my enquiry" page.
- **No conditional fields** — everything on the form is always on it.
- **No screen showing what was delivered.** If something stops working you are
  told by email; there is not yet a page listing recent deliveries.

If one of those is what you need, this is not the product for it yet, and it is
better to know now.
