There are two versions of this problem and they need different answers. The first is simple: the checkbox has not been ticked, and ticking it fixes everything. The second is the one that brings people back to search a second time. The checkbox is ticked, the notification still does not arrive, or it arrives for one person and not for the colleague who actually handles the replies. That second case is not a settings problem, and no amount of clicking in the Settings pane will resolve it.
Where the setting lives
There are two entry points to the same switch.
From the sharing flow, the confirmation window that appears after sending a form carries a Get notification messages toggle. Select it to turn notifications on, and select it again to turn them off.
From the form itself, open More form settings, then Response receipts, then Get email notification of each response. Microsoft describes it as getting notified by email each time a response is submitted, which is exactly what it does and no more.
One note on that page is easy to miss and worth following. Microsoft advises against turning notifications off immediately, so that the first notification email arrives after one day. That first email is not just a notification. It is also where the reminder function lives, as covered further down.
The three settings in Response receipts are not the same thing
The same panel holds three checkboxes with similar names, and a large share of confusion comes from ticking the wrong one.
| Setting | Who receives the email | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| Allow receipt of responses after submission | The respondent | The option to save or print a PDF of their own filled in answers from the Thank You page, and internal respondents can request an email receipt |
| Get email notification of each response | The form owner | One message per submitted response |
| Get smart notification emails to track the response status | The form owner | Customised reminders intended to raise the response rate, and only relevant if the invitation channel was used |
Two of those three are about somebody other than the person doing the searching. If the request was to let applicants keep a copy of what they submitted, the first row is the setting, and the second row will do nothing for them. If the request was to know when something has come in, the second row is the only one that matters.
The third one has a condition attached that is easy to overlook. Microsoft's description says to check it if the invitation channel was used, meaning the form was sent through the people picker rather than distributed as an open link. A form shared as a link on an intranet page has nobody to remind, so the setting has nothing to work with.
Why the notification does not arrive
Once the checkbox is confirmed on, the remaining causes are all outside the Settings pane.
The sender address is filtered. Microsoft Forms sends automated emails from [email protected] by default. That is an unusual looking sender, and it collects junk rules and tenant level filters. Before changing anything else, search the junk folder and then check the mailbox rules for anything matching the word forms.
The wrong account owns the form. The notification goes to the account whose settings pane holds the checkbox. If the form was built by a colleague and shared for collaboration, the checkbox in their copy of the settings controls their mailbox, not yours.
The form is a group form. A form created inside a Microsoft 365 group or a Teams team belongs to the group rather than to a person, and group forms behave differently in several places. The same divergence shows up in automation: the Microsoft Forms connector documentation states that group forms will not appear in the form dropdown and that the Form Id has to be pasted in manually, taken from the address bar after FormId=. Anything that assumes a personally owned form is worth re testing against a group form before relying on it.
The account type is personal. Several Forms features, including the organizational sharing options, are documented as available to Office 365 Education and Microsoft 365 Apps for business accounts. A workflow built from a guide written for a work tenant will not map cleanly onto a Hotmail, Live or Outlook.com account.
Nothing is broken and the volume is low. Worth ruling out before spending an afternoon on it. Submit a test response from a private browser window and time how long the email takes. That single test separates a delivery problem from a no responses problem, and it is quicker than any amount of settings archaeology.
Sending the notification to more than one person
This is where the built in feature runs out, and it is the most common reason people move on to something else.
The Response receipts panel offers a checkbox. It does not offer a field for a recipient address. There is nowhere to type a shared mailbox, a distribution list or a colleague, which means the answer to "can the notification also go to the support address" is no, not from this panel.
The documented route is Power Automate, and it is worth knowing its exact shape before planning around it. The Microsoft Forms connector provides one trigger, When a new response is submitted, and one action, Get response details. The action needs the Response Id from the trigger, and if that link is not wired up the flow will report success while producing empty fields. Everything else, the recipients, the subject, the layout of the answers in the body, is assembled by hand in the flow.
Two limits on that connector are worth writing down before the flow is built. It only works with organizational accounts. And its throttling allows 300 API calls per connection per 60 seconds, which is generous for a contact form and not generous for a mass registration that opens at nine in the morning.
The flow works. What it costs is a second system. The notification logic now lives in Power Automate, the form lives in Forms, the responses live in a third place, and the person who built the flow becomes the only person who can change who gets notified.
Reminders are a different feature, in a different place
A related search often hides behind the notification one: not being told when a response arrives, but nudging the people who have not responded yet.
Microsoft documents two routes. The first is the notification email that arrives the day after a form is sent to an audience, which carries a Send reminder action. The second is the form's own responses tab, where Remind them does the same job on demand.
One detail affects whether that first route is usable at all. There are two versions of the notification mail: an actionable message, which only works in Outlook, and an HTML version in other mail clients such as Windows Mail. Anyone reading notifications outside Outlook will see the HTML version, so the responses tab is the reliable route.
Where to read the responses once the emails are flowing
A notification tells you something arrived. It does not tell you what is still outstanding, and the next question is usually where to look instead.
The built in answer is the workbook. Selecting Open in Excel from the Responses tab produces a workbook with a live data connection to the form, stored automatically in OneDrive for work or school, or in SharePoint when the form is a group form. Response data syncs into it, so the latest rows appear each time the workbook is opened. The direction of that sync is worth being precise about: changes made in the workbook do not modify the form. It is a readable copy, not a shared record.
That one way behaviour is exactly why the added owner column drifts. The column lives in the workbook, the responses live in Forms, and a colleague who reads the responses in Forms sees no owner at all. Two people can be looking at the same submission with different information about whether it has been dealt with.
Volume introduces a second constraint. Above 50,000 responses on one form, Microsoft documents that summary charts and graphs, viewing individual responses from the Forms site, printing, sharing a summary link and manual grading are not supported, and the route to the data becomes a CSV export of all responses. Few contact forms reach that point, but registration and application forms do, and a process that depends on opening individual responses on the Forms site will stop working at a threshold nobody was watching for.
The practical reading order for a busy form is therefore: notification for awareness, a shared view for what is outstanding, and the export only for analysis. Problems start when the notification is asked to do all three jobs.
When a message per response is the wrong design
The notification email is a good fit for a form that receives a handful of responses a week and a bad fit for anything busier, and the failure mode is specific rather than general.
An email per response turns the inbox into the queue. That works until two people are watching the same inbox, at which point nothing records who picked up which message. The two familiar failures follow: the enquiry answered twice by two people who did not know about each other, and the enquiry nobody answered because each assumed the other had. Neither is a filing problem. There is no field anywhere in Forms that says who owns a response, so the information does not exist to be filed.
The workarounds people build are all the same shape. Export to a spreadsheet and add an owner column. Set up a flow that posts to a channel. Agree that whoever replies will mark the email with a flag. Each one puts the missing field somewhere outside the tool that holds the responses, and each one drifts, because keeping two records aligned by hand is work that nobody is assigned.
The alternative is to keep the status where the response is. When each submission carries an owner and a stage, the notification stops being the unit of work and becomes a courtesy. The queue can be read by anyone, and the question of who is handling something has an answer that does not depend on memory. The use cases where this matters most are the ones where a reply is expected: recruitment, enquiries, support intake, event registration.
What to change first
Tick Get email notification of each response under Response receipts, then submit one test response from a private window to confirm delivery and check the junk folder if it does not arrive. If the real requirement is that more than one person needs to know and it must be clear who is handling each response, that is not a notification setting, and Halict keeps the owner and the status on the response itself.
Q1. Can a Microsoft Forms notification be sent to more than one address?
Not from the settings. Response receipts offers a checkbox rather than a recipient field, so the notification goes to the account that enabled it. Sending to a shared mailbox or a distribution list requires a Power Automate flow built on the When a new response is submitted trigger.
Q2. Which sender address do Microsoft Forms notifications come from?
Microsoft Forms sends automated emails from [email protected] by default. That address is a common cause of notifications landing in junk, so it is the first thing to check when the setting is on but nothing arrives.
Q3. What is the difference between a response receipt and a notification?
Allow receipt of responses after submission is for the respondent, giving them the option to save or print a PDF of their own answers from the Thank You page. Get email notification of each response is for the form owner and produces one email per submission. Ticking one does nothing for the other.
Q4. Why do notifications stop working on a form owned by a Teams team?
Group forms belong to the group rather than to an individual, and they behave differently in several places. The Forms connector documentation notes that group forms do not appear in the form dropdown in Power Automate and that the Form Id must be entered by hand, which is a useful signal that anything built for a personal form needs retesting on a group form.
Q5. Does the notification email contain the answers?
It tells you a response has arrived and takes you to the response. For a message that contains specific answers, formatted the way a team wants to read them, the route is a flow using the Get response details action, which exposes the individual answers as dynamic content.
Q6. How can reminders be sent to people who have not responded?
Two ways are documented. The notification email that arrives the day after a form is sent carries a Send reminder action, and the responses tab of the form carries Remind them. The email version comes in an actionable form only in Outlook and as plain HTML elsewhere, so the responses tab is the dependable route.