Autoresponder

Open the form's Settings, find Autoresponder and double opt-in and tick Send an automatic reply. Save, and every person who submits gets a reply at the first email address in their submission (or the _replyto field). Leave the subject and message empty to use our wording, or write your own.

Put any field name in double braces and it is replaced with what the person typed: {{company}}, {{topic}}. Two extras always work: {{first_name}} (the first word of a name field if the form has no first-name field) and {{form}}, the form's name. A field that wasn't filled in is left blank.

Merged values are kept short and plain: one line, up to 80 characters, with links, email addresses and website names taken out. A reply goes to whatever address was typed into your form, so this is what stops anyone using your autoresponder to send their own links to other people. Every reply is also checked for phishing before it is sent.

Card puts your message in a clean framed layout. Plain looks like an email you typed yourself, which suits a personal reply. Neither includes images, and on plans with white-labelling our mark is removed.

Add a version per language under Other languages. Each visitor gets the version matching their browser language, or the one named by a _language field on your form (for example a hidden <input name="_language" value="de"> on your German page). Everyone else gets your main message. Up to ten languages; merge fields work in every version.

No reply goes to submissions held as spam or pitches, to ones that look automated, or when the submission has no email address. Test submissions get one, so you can see what it looks like. With double opt-in on, the confirmation email comes first and the reply follows once they confirm. Each reply is logged with its delivery result.

The same settings are the autoResponder object on PATCH /v1/forms/:id in the write API: enabled, subject, body, fromName, layout (card or plain) and translations.

curl -X PATCH https://api.webforms.to/v1/forms/frm_xxx \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wf_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"autoResponder": {
        "enabled": true,
        "subject": "Thanks, {{first_name}}",
        "body": "We got your message about {{topic}} and will reply within a day.",
        "layout": "plain",
        "translations": {"de": {"subject": "Danke, {{first_name}}", "body": "Wir melden uns innerhalb eines Tages."}}
      }}'