Webflow Forms not working

My team and I have been using the built in Webflow forms on all of our websites. But in the last 6 months now a lot of our clients have stopped receiving the form submissions.

To fix this I contacted Webflow support about it, and they said that our clients emails had been blacklisted. And they were happy to help and removed them from the blacklist.

But it kept happening. And I kept contacting them for them to remove them from the list.

The only explanation I got for why the emails came to be on the blacklist was that the clients must have clicked on the “Unsubscribe from notifications for this site.” at the bottom of the form submissions they received.

So I started to inform our clients to not push this link.

But still I got clients who didn’t receive any form submissions, and they said they had never pushed the link.

I finally got a different answer from Webflow support telling me that after they had removed a clients email from the blacklist, it automatically got re-added to the blacklist. And the reason for it to be re-added was the the email address was a role-based email.
And such email addresses can not receive form sumbmissions.
And I got this link to read up on what role-based email was:
https://www.cakemail.com/help/role-based-emails/

Most of our client’s emails are post@ or something that is role-based.
So I’m guessing that most of our clients aren’t receiving the form submissions.

And Webflow has never mentioned anything about the role-based emails anywhere on their website, or tutorials.
Not a single mention on the “Intro to Forms”

So we are left with three options (maybe more if you have some)

  1. We send out an email to all of our clients telling about the problem, and to fix this they have to provide us with a new email address that is not role-based.
    We currently have over 100 published websites, so it’s not likely that everyone will do and in some cases even know how to create a new email for themselves.

  2. We create a new form on all of our websites. Either code it ourselves, or use a different form tool.
    Again, we have over 100 published websites, so to do this will take a lot of time.

  3. Webflow removes the role-based email address rule. So every email address gets the form submissions.

Have anyone else had this problem?
Or are aware of this problem?

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I’m going out on a limb here… but my guess is the role based email ruling is a new criteria raised by the GDPR rules. Rather then toggling it on and off per country… Webflow is probably just enforcing it globally.

It likely is just a data security issue that GDPR had specifics on.

I’m curious what the answer is here. The unsubscribe issue has been around forever and Webflow hasn’t fully addressed. I can’t believe the “roles” thing is real or Webflow would have mentioned something. Also most businesses use “roles” for things like sales, contact or info. Are those really restricted by GDPR?

If that’s the case Webflow should address this in their documentation on how their forms work. And specifically state that one should only use non role-based emails to be the receiver of Webflow’s forms.

But I can’t understand why Webflow would do this in regards to the GDPR rules. Because if the rules would be broken, it would be by the receiver of the forms, and not Webflow.
Webflow should not interfere and restricting who is the receiver of the forms, since it all comes down the individual companies who they handle form submissions. If a company has a team that handles all communication to the company, it is natural for that company to have a role-based email to handle all the incoming form submissions.

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Indeed.

And I’m also curious if more people are having the same issue as we do. This started late last summer for us, and I haven’t seen a single mention of this issue. They kept saying the issue was that the email had been blacklisted, but with no explanation as to how they ended up being blacklisted in the first place.

And having over 100 published website it is a big problem for us to check if everyone are receiving the form submissions. And also get our clients to provide us with non role-based emails.

You might want to consider a third party form processor. Usebasin.com would resolve this issue and is pretty much plug and play with webflow. You don’t need to change the form. Just the action URL. Roles are supported and you can white label it the backend if clients need to login to download, or view submissions. They also support recaptcha on a form by form basis using their key, and askimet is included. No brainer at $15 / month for top tier plan (as many clients as you want).

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Thanks! Will check it out!