The phrase covers three different jobs, and the results page treats them as one. Someone submitted a form and wants to see what they typed. Someone runs a form and wants every respondent to get a receipt automatically. Someone has already collected two hundred responses and wants to send copies back retroactively. Only one of those has a built in answer, and it has a prerequisite that is easy to miss.
Sorting out which job is in front of you takes about a minute, and it saves the wasted afternoon of hunting for a setting that was never going to appear.
The setting, and the one thing it depends on
Google calls this feature response receipts. It lives in the form editor, and it is switched off by default.
The prerequisite is email collection. A form cannot send a copy of an answer to a person whose address it never recorded, so the receipt option stays unavailable until email collection is on. In Settings, under Responses, Collect email addresses has two values. The verified option records the address on the Google Account the respondent is signed in to, and the confirmation that this is happening is shown to them on each page of the form. The responder entry option instead adds an email question that the person fills in themselves.
Once email collection is set, the same Responses panel offers Send responders a copy of their response, with two choices:
- When requested puts a tick box on the form. The respondent decides whether they want the email.
- Always sends the copy on every submission, with no choice offered.
The difference matters more than it looks. When requested is the honest default for anything optional, such as a feedback survey, because a receipt nobody asked for reads as a stray email. Always is correct for anything the person may need to prove later: an application, an order, a registration, a consent record. A tick box in those cases just means some people will have no record and will ask for one.
There is one caveat published alongside the feature, and it is worth quoting to colleagues before they blame the form. Google notes that in certain circumstances responders may not receive expected response receipts because of spam filters or other counter abuse measures. The form will still show its normal confirmation page, so a missing receipt produces no error anywhere the form owner can see it.
Why the option looks greyed out
Almost every report of a greyed out or missing receipt setting comes down to email collection being off. Turn it on and the option becomes available in the same panel.
Two adjacent settings get confused with it. The confirmation message, under Presentation, is the text on the screen after submitting. It is not an email and it goes nowhere the person can search for later. View results summary, also under Presentation, gives respondents a link to aggregate results for the whole form, including full text answers for each question, visible to anyone who can respond. That is a very different exposure from sending one person their own answers, and it should not be switched on by accident while looking for the receipt setting.
Allow response editing, under Responses, is the third neighbour. It lets someone reopen and change what they submitted, and the edit link is what makes their own answers visible to them again. Enabling it changes what a submission means, since the answer in the sheet can change after the fact. That is useful for a draft application and wrong for a signed acknowledgement.
What the receipt contains, and what it will never contain
The built in receipt is a plain listing of the questions and the answers, sent from Google's own address. There is no place to edit the wording, add a next step, attach a document, or route replies to a shared mailbox. It answers one question, which is what the person wrote, and nothing else.
For a survey that is enough. For intake, it usually is not, because the moment somebody submits an application is the moment they most want to know what happens next and by when. A receipt that only mirrors their own typing leaves that gap open, and the gap arrives as a follow up email a day later asking whether the form went through.
This is the point where teams start looking at add ons, and it is worth knowing what that path costs before taking it.
Who actually needs the copy
The decision gets easier when it is framed as a question about the respondent rather than a question about the form. Does this person need to hold a record of what they submitted, for their own use, without asking anyone?
For some forms the answer is obviously yes. An expense claim becomes a dispute three weeks later about which figure was entered. A conference registration gets forwarded to whoever books the travel. A parental consent form gets asked about by the other parent. A job application gets referenced in an interview by a candidate who wrote it six weeks earlier and no longer remembers what they claimed. In each case the receipt is not a courtesy, it is the only copy the person will ever have, and withholding it means every query comes back to the form owner as a lookup request.
For other forms the answer is no, and sending anyway costs something. An anonymous staff survey that mails everyone a full transcript of their own answers undoes some of the reason people answered honestly, especially on a shared computer or a work account that someone else can search. A one question poll generates an email with no value. A high frequency form used many times a day by the same internal team produces noise that trains people to filter the sender, which then catches the one message that mattered.
The tick box option exists for the middle ground, and it is fine there. What it should not be used for is avoiding the decision on a form where the record clearly matters, because the people who most need the copy are often the least likely to notice a small tick box near the submit button.
The add on route and the quota nobody reads
Custom confirmation emails from Google Forms are built on Apps Script, whether written directly or installed from the Marketplace. The add ons in this category do genuinely useful things that the native setting cannot: wording written for the audience, the organisation's own name in the sender line, an attached document generated from the answers, a different message depending on which option was chosen, and a copy to an internal address at the same time. If the receipt has to carry a next step or a reference number, this is the only route inside Google Forms.
It comes with a ceiling. Apps Script has published daily quotas, and the relevant row is email recipients per day: 100 per day on a consumer Google account, against 1,500 per day on a Google Workspace account.
That ceiling is the single most common cause of receipts that worked in testing and stopped in production. A registration form for a local event on a personal Gmail account will send its first hundred receipts and then quietly send none. The form keeps accepting responses. The confirmation page keeps appearing. Nothing in the form editor reports a failure. The first signal is a person asking why they heard nothing, which arrives days after the fact.
Before building a process on a script, check which of those two numbers applies to the account that owns the form, and compare it against the busiest day the form will ever have rather than the average.
Getting copies for responses already submitted
Retroactive receipts are the request with no built in answer. Turning the setting on affects submissions from that point forward and does not reach back.
What exists instead are the records the form already keeps.
| What is needed | Where it comes from | Reaches the respondent |
|---|---|---|
| One person's answers, for the owner to read | Responses, Individual tab | No, needs a manual email |
| All answers as rows | Responses, Link to Sheets | No |
| All answers as a file | Responses, More, Download responses (.csv) | No |
| A receipt for every new submission | Settings, Responses, send responders a copy | Yes, from now on |
| A custom email on every submission | Apps Script or a Marketplace add on | Yes, within the daily quota |
| A copy for submissions already in | Mail merge from the sheet, or a tool that sends from the response | Yes, manually |
The practical route for a backlog is a mail merge from the linked sheet, with the answers pulled into the body. It works, and it is a one off task that has to be repeated every time the question comes up again, which is the reason teams eventually move the receipt to the tool that holds the response.
Volume is the other thing that shapes this, because Forms has published thresholds where features drop away while submissions keep arriving. Past 10,000 responses the per question and individual views stop appearing and a downloaded CSV is no longer sorted by submission time. Past 50,000 the response summary is gone. Past 100,000 responses are no longer synced to Sheets. A form that has crossed those lines is a poor base for any retroactive work, and the CSV is the only reliable export left.
A receipt is not a reply
Worth separating the two, because the search term blurs them. A receipt is automatic, identical for everyone, and proves that something arrived. A reply is written by a person, differs by case, and says what happens next.
Sending receipts well does not reduce the number of replies owed. It changes which ones are urgent, because nobody has to email to ask whether the form submitted. The replies that remain are the real ones, and those are the work.
That work is where a spreadsheet stops helping. Columns for owner and status record an intention that nothing enforces, and the reply itself is composed in a mail client with no link back to the row. Two people can answer the same applicant on the same morning without either seeing the other, and a response nobody claimed looks exactly like a response somebody handled. A form tool with response management closes that by keeping the answers, the owner, the status and the sent mail on one screen, and by sending the acknowledgement from the response itself rather than from a separate script with its own quota. The use cases page shows what that looks like for intake, applications and sign ups.
What to change first
If email collection is off, turn it on and set the copy to Always for anything a person may need to prove later, When requested for anything optional. If a script is sending the receipts, check the account type against the 100 and 1,500 recipient rows today rather than after somebody complains. If the receipt keeps needing to say more than the answers, the acknowledgement belongs with the response rather than in a separate tool, and Halict sends the auto reply with a copy of what was written from the same screen where the real reply gets composed.
Q1. Why is the option to send responders a copy greyed out?
Email collection is off. The setting sits under Responses in Settings, and it only becomes available once Collect email addresses is set to the verified option or to responder entry. Without an address on file the form has nowhere to send the copy.
Q2. Can copies be sent for responses that were already submitted?
Not by the built in setting. Switching it on applies to new submissions only. For a backlog, export the responses to the linked sheet or a CSV and run a mail merge, or move the form to a tool that can send from an existing response.
Q3. Why did the confirmation emails stop arriving after about a hundred?
That is the Apps Script daily quota if the receipts come from a script or an add on. A consumer Google account is limited to 100 email recipients per day, against 1,500 for a Google Workspace account. The form keeps working and reports nothing, so the failure stays invisible until someone asks.
Q4. Can the wording of the copy be changed?
No. The built in receipt lists the questions and the answers in a fixed format sent from Google's address. Changing the wording, adding a next step or attaching a file requires a script, an add on, or a form tool that owns the reply.
Q5. How can someone see their own answers if no copy was sent?
Only if the form allows it. With response editing turned on they can reopen their submission through the edit link, and with the results summary turned on they can see aggregate results. Otherwise the answers are visible to the form owner only, and the person has to ask.
Q6. Does sending a copy expose the other responses?
No. The receipt contains one person's own answers. The setting that exposes more is View results summary under Presentation, which shows results for every response to anyone who can respond to the form, and it is easy to switch on while looking for the receipt setting.