A form is the component of your app (that you’ve built using Zoho Creator), through which your users can submit data. In addition to the default method of data entry where users access your form, enter data in the fields and submit the form, you can enable your users to simply email data to your form. 

Each form in your Zoho Creator app has an email address by default. Your users can send an email to this address to submit their data. This feature is called email form data.

Before you proceed:

For email form data to work, the email sent must be plain text only. If it's not, the data won't be added to Creator.

Who can make use of this feature?

The Email Data feature is available for all accounts except those on the free plan.

Who can email data to your form?

There are two options available:

Allow from Everyone: Selecting this enables anyone (who is aware of your form's email address) to send data to it.

Allow Only from Application Users: This is selected by default, and refers to your app's users with whom you've shared this form and assigned them permission to create records in it.

How can I collect data?

You can collect form data through email in the below two formats:

• You share your form’s template with your users, and they email their data as per this template. Refer to this section to learn more
  
• You let your users email their data, and you make your form separately capture the From address, subject, message, and attachments. Refer to this section to learn more 

Using the form's template

Emailing data is an added provision. It does not restrict your users from accessing your form and entering their data. To keep the user experience of your form consistent, your form's template contains the field name of all fields on your form except  subform, audio, video, formula, auto-number, and add-notes.

To email data in this format, your users must:

1. Set your form's email address as the To address.
2. Paste your form's email template in the email's body and enter appropriate against the fields. ( Rich text i s not supported in the email's body)
3. If your form has image or file-upload fields, your users must attach the required files to the email and enter the names (of the attached) files as values against the respective fields. 

Capturing the email

The Email Data feature also lets you have your user's email data and make your form separately capture that email's parts (From address, subject, message, and attachments) in the respective fields on the form.

Create a form with any of the below fields:

• Add an email or single-line field to your form. Set its field link name as ZC_From. This is to capture the From address of the email.

• Add a single-line or multi-line field to your form. Set its field link name as ZC_Subject. This is to capture the email's subject.

• Add a rich-text field to your form. Set its field link name as ZC_Content. This is to capture the email's body.

• Add a file upload field to your form. Set its field link name as ZC_File. This is to capture an attachment in the email.

• If you expect multiple attachments in your incoming emails, you need to add that many number of file-upload fields and set their field link names as ZC_File0, ZC_File1, and so on.
  

• ​The attachments in the incoming emails will be alphabetically captured. In other words, if the email has files "a.txt" and "b.pdf" attached, then "a.txt" will be captured by the field ZC_File0 and "b.pdf" by the field ZC_File1.
  

1. Set your form's email address as the To address.
2. Enter their data in the email's body.
3. If their data include images or files, they must attach it to their email. If your users attach more files than the number of image/file-upload fields, only the files that are attached first will be captured, and the other files will be ignored.

Things to know

• Supported workflow blocks : This feature supports the execution of workflows that are set to trigger actions before a record is  Created (On Validate), and after a record is Created (On Success).
• Attachments in email :
  
  • The file-upload field accepts files of size up to 50 MB. The image field accepts images up to 10 MB in size.
  • However, an email can accept attachments up to 25 MB.
• Email notifications :
  
  • If a user without the required permission sends an email, adding a record will fail and a reply will be sent to that user (email subject: Authorization failed).
  • If adding a record fails for any other reason (say, value not given for a mandatory field), that user will receive a reply (email subject: Error occurred while adding record).

Related topics

• Email data to a form