The short version
Public web form: turn on the built-in notification, add your addresses, done. Internal SharePoint list form: the form writes the list item, and a Power Automate flow on the list trigger sends the mail. There is no third route that avoids both, and anyone promising you one is describing a flow with a friendlier label on it.
On a public web form, it is a setting
Forms365 Web sends notification email itself. On the form's settings you nominate who hears about a submission, up to ten addresses, and you can send a receipt back to the person who filled the form in. That second one matters more than teams expect. Somebody who submits a request and gets nothing back tends to submit it again the next day, and now you have two records of one request and a support conversation about which is real.
Because it is part of the form, the notification travels with the form. Hand the form to a colleague or publish a new version and the setting is still there, because it belongs to the form rather than sitting in a separate tool. Nothing to remember, nothing to break when the person who built the flow changes teams.
On an internal list form, it is a flow
Forms365 Workspace replaces the list form itself. It writes to your SharePoint columns and leaves the mail to Power Automate, which is the tool your organisation almost certainly already uses for this. There is no built connector between the two products, and none is needed: a saved form is a created list item, and "When an item is created" fires on it like it fires on anything else.
- 1 Open Power Automate and start a flow from the "When an item is created" trigger, pointing it at the site and the list your form writes to.
- 2 Add a condition if only some submissions deserve an email. A leave request over five days, or an amount above a threshold.
- 3 Add the "Send an email (V2)" action. Put the requester in the To field if the notification is a receipt, or the responsible team if it is a work item.
- 4 Build the subject and body from the list columns. Include a link back to the item so the reader can act rather than reply asking for detail.
- 5 Submit one real form and watch the run history. If the flow fires but the mail never lands, the problem is the mailbox, not the form.
The condition in step two is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether anyone still reads these emails in six months. An inbox that gets a message for every submission gets a rule that files them all away unread.
When email is the wrong shape
Sometimes the thing that needs to know about the submission is not a person. A ticketing system, a scheduling tool, an app that lives outside Microsoft 365 entirely. Both products can post an on-submit webhook to a URL you own, over HTTPS, and it can be signed so your endpoint can prove the request came from the form. That is a better fit than mailing a human who then retypes the details into another system. The webhook walkthrough covers the payload and the signature check.
What to put in the email
Most notification email is bad in the same way: it announces that something happened without saying what, so the reader has to go and look. Worth including:
- A subject line with the identifying detail in it. "Leave request, Priya Nair, 14 to 18 September" beats "New submission".
- A direct link to the list item or the submission, so the reader can act from the mail.
- Only the fields the recipient needs. A twenty-field form does not need a twenty-field email.
- Who submitted it and when.
And leave attachments out unless somebody genuinely needs the file in their inbox. A link to the record keeps one copy of the document in one place, which is the whole reason the form writes to SharePoint rather than mailing you a PDF.
Two things that go wrong
The first is delivery. A notification to an external address can land in junk, especially the first few times, and nobody notices because the sender never hears about it. Send a real submission to an outside address early and check where it ends up.
The second is ownership. A flow built by one person, under their account, sending mail to a team, is a small time bomb. When they leave, the flow stops and the requests keep arriving into a list nobody is watching. If the notification matters, put the flow in a solution or under a service account, or use a form that carries its own notification and has nothing to leave behind.
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Common questions
How many people can be notified on a Forms 365 Web form?
Up to ten addresses on the form, plus an optional receipt back to the person who filled it in. If you need more than ten, send to a distribution group or a shared mailbox and manage the membership there instead of on the form.
Can an internal SharePoint list form send the email itself?
No. Forms365 Workspace writes to your SharePoint list and stops there. The email comes from a Power Automate flow on a list trigger, or from an on-submit webhook into something you already run. That is a deliberate split: the list is the record, and the notification is a separate concern that your organisation probably already has opinions about.
What replaced the old SharePoint "Alert me" emails?
Power Automate, in practice. Alert me was the one-click way to get a mail when a list item appeared, and its retirement is why so many teams went looking for a replacement. A flow on the "When an item is created" trigger covers the same ground with far more control over who gets what.