How to get email notifications for Google Forms responses

Last updated September 2026 · ~10 minute read

Short answer: Open your form, go to the Responses tab, open the More menu (⋮) and choose “Get email notifications for new responses.” That emails you. Google's help page documents no way to point it at anyone else, and inside Forms email is the only channel it offers — for an instant push on your phone, Forms+ has a per-form Push toggle.

It is a two-click setting, so most of this guide is about the parts people actually get stuck on: which of the three emails called “notifications” you are really asking for, what the built-in option deliberately does not do, and what the Forms API can and cannot be made to do about any of it.

How we checked

Every claim about Google's behaviour below is tied to a page we opened, and the URL is in the text — the Forms help centre, the Apps Script reference, the API guides, Google's own code samples, and the API's machine-readable discovery document (revision 20260909, read directly rather than through a reference page). Where Google publishes nothing — and here that covers most of the interesting detail — this page says so.

Three different emails, all called “notifications”

Most dead ends start here. Three separate features share one word, with different recipients in different parts of the form, and switching on the wrong one produces exactly the symptom people report as “notifications are broken”:

• You are told a response arrived. This is the one in the Responses tab, the subject of this page. The recipient is the account that switched it on — Google's help page never names any other.
• The respondent gets a copy of their own answers. Google calls this a response receipt, and it is a different control in a different menu, with the respondent as the recipient. Our guide to Google Forms response receipts covers it, including the long list of things Google never documents about the email itself.
• Somebody else is emailed, conditionally. “If the answer is Urgent, email the on-call address” — and Google Forms ships no rule engine at all. That is laid out in Google Forms notification rules; if the second person is a co-editor, notifications for collaborators is the narrower answer.

Pick the row that matches what you want before changing any setting. If you already turned something on and nothing arrives, the diagnosis lives in notifications not working.

Turn on Google's built-in notification

1. Open your form and switch to the Responses tab.
2. Open the More menu — the three-dot button.
3. Choose “Get email notifications for new responses.”

Those are Google's own steps. Its View & manage form responses help page files them under the heading Turn response notifications on or off and gives them as four lines: “Open a form in Google Forms.” … “At the top of the form, click Responses.” … “Click More.” … “Click Get email notifications for new responses.” There is no options dialog behind it and no confirmation screen — the menu item is the entire feature.

What Google documents about the email itself

Here the honest answer is uncomfortable: Google documents the click path and stops. Nothing states what the message contains, whether it quotes the answers or only announces that a response landed, what address it comes from, or how quickly it is sent. The one forward-looking sentence on the page is an exit: “To get more notifications options and send customized follow up emails to respondents, download the Form notifications add-on.”

So the only reliable description of the email is the one you generate yourself. Submit a test response to your own form and read what arrives — that is the only way to write a mail filter you can trust, and worth doing before you rely on the alert for anything time-sensitive, because Google publishes no delivery-time commitment for these messages at all.

What the built-in setting will not do

Three limits catch people out, and none of them are bugs — the feature is simply narrow:

• It only notifies you. The help page documents no recipient control, and for anything more it points you at the Form notifications add-on.
• It is per form, not per account. Turning it on for one form does nothing for the others — far and away the most common reason people believe notifications are broken.
• Email is the only channel in Forms. No push, no SMS, no webhook in the editor. If the inbox is the problem, the built-in setting cannot solve it.

Nor is there a condition, a digest or a frequency control: it fires on every response or on none.

The respondent's copy is a separate switch

People often turn on the Responses-tab notification expecting respondents to get something too. They do not — that is the second feature in the list above, and Google states its dependency in one sentence: “If you collect responder emails, you can choose whether respondents get a copy of their answers.” The control is not in the Responses tab at all; it sits in Settings, inside the expanded Responses group, as “Send responders a copy of their response,” with When requested or Always as its two documented values — and it needs email collection switched on first.

One warning if you manage forms from a phone: Forms+ can show a settings row worded almost exactly like Google's — “Send responders a copy of their response,” subtitled “Requires ‘Collect email addresses’” — which drives the app's own Apps Script trigger, not Google's native receipt setting. Two mechanisms, near-identical names, so the two can legitimately disagree on screen. When in doubt, trust what your live form prints at the foot of the page.

That row is not drawn for everyone, and what decides it is not a property of the form. It appears only where your account is running the app's own Apps Script response trigger, which means it is present on every form you open or on none of them — never on some. Where it is absent the Responses group runs straight from Collect email addresses to Limit to 1 response, and Google's own receipt setting, a tap deeper under Advanced response settings, is the only route left to a respondent copy — and that row is conditional too, on the app’s newer-features flag, and several separate things can switch that flag off — your region, a remote switch, and, unless that test is itself disabled remotely, an install dating from before 2024. With neither drawn, the app offers no respondent copy at all and the setting has to be made in a desktop browser. The rows every account gets are Collect email addresses, Limit to 1 response, Allow response editing and View results summary.

What the Forms API can do — and why it is not email

The natural next thought is that the API must expose all of this. It does not. The API's FormSettings object carries exactly two properties — emailCollectionType and quizSettings — so no field anywhere in the REST surface reaches the owner notification or the respondent receipt. Neither can be switched on, off, or even read programmatically. The Apps Script Form class is the same story: it will tell you whether the form “collects respondents' email addresses,” and nothing at all about either email.

What the API does offer is forms.watches — and a watch is a subscription, not a message. Google's push notifications guide states the destination in one line: “Notifications are delivered to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, usually within minutes of the change.” The discovery document backs that up — the only target a watch accepts is a Pub/Sub topic, which “must be owned by the calling project and already exist in Pub/Sub.” No address, no mailbox, no email anywhere in the shape.

Three more properties decide whether it is usable for you:

• It carries no data. “Notifications do not contain detailed form or response data. After each notification is received, a separate API call is required to fetch fresh data.” Google's platform comparison repeats it from the other side, listing “Including detailed form or response data in the body of pub/sub notifications” among the things the REST API does not support.
• It expires in a week. “Your watch lasts a week, but you can extend it at any point before it expires by making a request to watches.renew()” — the discovery document puts it as seven days from creation, reset to seven days on each renewal. An unattended watch stops on its own.
• There are at most two per form. The discovery document is explicit: “For each invoking project, the per form limit is one watch per Watch.EventType,” and there are two event types — SCHEMA for edits to content and settings, RESPONSES for submissions. Surrounding quotas: Google Forms API limits.

One inconsistency to be aware of if you copy Google's code: the published Node.js sample on that same page annotates the request body with “The event type to watch for. ‘RESPONSES’ is the only supported type,” while the page's own prose and the discovery enum both list two. Trust the discovery document — it is generated from the service.

The practical reading: the API gives a program a reliable nudge that something happened, and someone still has to build the part that turns that nudge into a message a human reads.

Getting a push instead of an email

An email about a response still means opening your inbox to find out. Forms+ treats the two as separate switches per form, so a submission can land on your lock screen directly:

1. Open the form in Forms+ — one your own Google account owns.
2. Tap the bell in the editor toolbar (it also sits in the Responses screen's Manage menu).
3. Turn on Push notifications, Email notifications, or both.

Both switches are PRO features to turn on; neither is gated when you turn one off, because an upgrade screen should never stand between you and stopping a notification you no longer want. That is the notification surface only — not an exhaustive list of what is PRO or free elsewhere in the app. One caveat on the pair: Push notifications is there whenever the bell is, but Email notifications sits behind the app's newer-features flag, and several separate things can switch that flag off — your region, a remote switch, and, unless that test is itself disabled remotely, an install dating from before 2024. Where it is off the sheet shows push alone, and Google's own built-in setting above remains the way to get an email.

One condition sits in front of all of it: who owns the form. On a form someone else shared with you, Forms+ does not draw the bell at all — not in the editor toolbar and not as a Notifications row in the Responses screen's Manage menu. It is removed rather than locked, so there is no padlock to tap and no upgrade that brings it back; the same is true of the Form Scheduler and the Response Limiter. To be notified about a form you do not own, ask its owner to switch notifications on, or have ownership transferred in Google Drive. (A few long-standing accounts, on the app's previous scheduling backend, keep the bell on shared forms as well, and the feature can also be switched off remotely — so a missing bell is not by itself proof of ownership.)

Quick comparison

Frequently asked questions

Can Google Forms email someone other than the form owner?

Not with the built-in setting. Google documents no recipient control and points to the Form notifications add-on for more options, including customised follow-up emails to respondents.

Can I get a push notification instead of an email?

Not from Google Forms — email is the only built-in channel. Forms+ has a per-form Push toggle alongside the email one.

Why am I not getting Google Forms notification emails?

Almost always because the setting is per form, not per account. Enabling it on one form does not enable it anywhere else. Check you turned it on for that specific form, that you own it, and that the mail is not being filtered.

What does the notification email actually contain?

Google does not publish it. No help page states what the message includes, who it comes from or how fast it arrives, so the only reliable way to know is to submit a test response to your own form and read the email that turns up.

Can the Google Forms API send a notification email?

No. The API's watches feature delivers notifications to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, not to an inbox, and they carry no form or response data — a separate API call fetches the response. A watch also expires seven days after creation unless renewed, and each project may hold one watch per event type per form.