Sending SMS or email confirmations is not available for child forms, e.g. within a portal.
SMS
Sending SMS to users after they submit a form can be set up in just a couple of steps:
Go to the form's Submission Actions section
Turn on Send SMS confirmation to user
Select the Phone number field. Make sure it includes the country code as explained here!
Select the SMS message field. This is a formula field that can include data from other fields, e.g. the user's name or a link to review their submission etc. The message can be up to 1600 characters in length, but this may vary by region. The safe limit is 140 characters.
You have two options for email confirmations after form submission:
Send an email of form submissions to admin: This is a simple confirmation email to the miniExtensions workspace owner. You can also add Additional email addresses to notify.
Send an email of form submission to user: Custom email to a specific email address (usually sent to the user). This is explained in detail below.
Both options can be found under Email Confirmation in the Submission Actions section of the form settings.
How to send a custom email
You can send a custom email after form submissions, and the email body supports HTML tags, allowing for plenty of options to customize it. If you’re unfamiliar with HTML, you can use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini to help generate the code for you.
To enable this feature, go to the Submission Actions section in the form settings and turn on Send an email of form submission to user. You can then define the recipient’s email address, the subject, and the body of the email using Airtable fields. Additionally, you can change the “Email From” field to set the sender’s name. If left blank, the default sender name will be miniExtensions.
If the fields selected for the email address, subject or body contain invalid (or no) data, users will see an error message upon submission: "Bad request". In this scenario, the actual submission still goes through to Airtable, so no data is lost, but the confirmation email fails to send.
If the recipient email address is derived from a linked record (e.g. using a lookup field), you will need to create a formula field that converts that lookup field into a string, and use this formula as the recipient email address, e.g.:
ARRAYJOIN({Email (from Customer)}, ", ")
How to use HTML tags and data from the table fields in the email body
If you have two users who will interact with the same record in Airtable, like a user/reviewer relation, you can use two forms for the same Airtable base: one for the user, and a limited version for the reviewer. Once your user submits their form, the reviewer will receive an email with the link to the review form, which can have the fields the first user filled in read-only mode and some new fields for the second user to populate. Set it up like this:
Add the email of the reviewer as an email field in Airtable
Add a new formula field that will contain the 'Edit URL' from the modified version of your form. This is the version that the reviewer will receive through email. This formula field will also form the body of the email, so you can add further data to it as needed and also give it format with HTML like in the example below.
CONCATENATE("
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en'>
<head>
<meta charset='UTF-8'>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello ",{Name},"</p>
<p>This is an example email, you can use HTML code to polish the email's body to your liking.</p>
<p>Use this URL to edit the form: <br>",'<a href="https://web.miniextensions.com/zidtzz8g7283H9kXRyH7/',RECORD_ID(),'"',">Edit Form</a>","</p>
<p>Best regards,<br>Your Name</p>
</body>
</html>
")To have HTML code inside of your formula field, use a CONCATENATE() function to contain it. You can then follow the structure of the CONCATENATE() function to add fields from your table and the edit URL from your miniExtensions form to the body of your email. This works by using a quotation mark and a comma to divide the code. See the name field: {Name} and the URL 'https://web.miniextensions.com/ElO5XKVPOAJjXYCs7FdQ/' & RECORD_ID() in the example above.
The resulting email with this code looks like this:
Configure the Submission Actions section to use the formula field with the modified form's URL as the Email Body, and the reviewer email as the email field.
Sending emails is only available on certain plans and has daily limits for the number of emails that can be sent. Consult this help article to learn more.