When someone fills out your Google Form, you may want to send a file or two to the form respondent. For instance:

A school teacher can send a Word document containing a copy of the answers to students who have completed the quiz.

A musician can send her latest composition as an MP3 file to users who have completed her website survey built with Google Forms.

An author can email a preview copy of her upcoming book in PDF to fans who have subscribed to her newsletter.

An online store may send their catalog PDF to customers who have placed orders through Google Forms.

Demo - Send Files with Google Forms

Open this Google Form, type your email address and hit the Submit button. Check your inbox and you should immediately find a PDF copy of our famous 101 useful websites collection.

How to Attach Files to Form Emails

The Email Notifications add-on for Google Forms lets you send customized emails to form respondents after a new entry is received. The same notification can also be customized to include one or more file attachments that are picked from your Google Drive and sent as an attachment in the auto-responder email.

Add File to Google Drive

Go to the Google Drive website and upload any file that you wish to send via Google Forms.

Change the sharing settings on the file so that it is accessible to anyone with a link. You cannot attach private files to form emails.

Right-click the file in Google Drive and choose Get Link to copy the full URL of the file to the clipboard.

Gmail is very effective at filtering spam emails but spammers seem to have figured out a new way to bypass the spam filters and send emails that land right in the user’s inbox. The emails are sent through Google Forms and because the messages originate from Google’s own email servers, they do not get caught in the spam filters.

Google Forms - Spam Emails

Here’s how spam emails are sent through Google Forms.

A public form is created with Google Forms.

The form creator uploads images for the various question fields and also adds links to spam websites in the form.

Inside the Form settings, they turn on the option to “Collect Email Addresses” including the option to send “Response receipts” when a new form is submitted.

Google Form Email

Now the spammers can simply open the Google Form, fill in the recipient’s email address and hit the submit button.

Google Forms will automatically email a copy of the form response, including all the pictures and links contained in the original form, to the email address that was entered in the form.