Sending an Autoresponder email right after your user submits a form may not always be the right way for you. You may want to notify your users at a later date. For example, you have a hotel booking form and you want to notify your form’s respondents one day before their check-in date. This function can be helpful for you in this case.
To set up the Send Emails Later function:
- Click on Settings at the top of your Form Builder’s screen.
- At the left section of the screen, click on Emails.
- Hover over the Autoresponder and click on the pencil icon to open the settings of your Autoresponder.

If you don’t have an Autoresponder Email in your form, check out this Setting up an Autoresponder Email guide to create one.
After opening the settings of your Autoresponder, click the Advanced tab. There you will see the Send Emails Later option.

the dropdown list has a lot of options to choose from in order to decide when you would like your emails to be sent.

- Right away – this is the default option, Autoresponder emails are sent right after the submission is received.
- 7 Days – email is sent 7 days after the submission date.
- 14 Days – email is sent 14 days after the submission date.
- On a later date – after clicking this option, you can choose your preferred date of email to be sent from the opening date field.
- CustomDateFields – these are your date fields that are on the form. By choosing them, your form’s respondents can specify the date they would like to receive the email. If you have another date field on your form, it will also appear on your Send Emails Later dropdown list.
Setting up an Email Reminder
So let’s see this function in action. Let’s say you have a hotel booking form and you would like to notify your guests about their check-in date the day before they check-in. first, you’ll need to create a simple booking form as seen below:

There are two date fields on this form:
- Check-in Date – this field is for the user to enter their desired check-in date.
- Guest Notification Date – a hidden field that we will use in our send emails later option. Users will not be able to see this field, and we will set this field’s date as Check-in Date – 1 by setting the Conditions feature of Jotform.
Start by hiding the Guest Notification Date field.
- Select the field, and click the gear icon next to it.

- In the Date Picker Properties section, click on Advanced.
- Toggle On the Hide field option.

Now as the notify date field has been set as hidden, users will not be able to see it when they are filling up the form. Now use conditions to set the notify date as the day before the check-in date. To set up conditions:
- On your form builder screen, click Settings at the top.
- Select Conditions from the left panel.
- There will be a list of condition types to select from, choose Update/Calculate Field.

- After that, enter the information about this condition. In the example above; if the Check-in Date (user chooses the date) is filled, the Guest Notification Field is calculated and filled as Check-in Date – 1. You can set different conditions like Check-in Date – 7 if you would like to notify your customers one week before their check-in date.
- After you set your condition, don’t forget to click the Save button.
Now that the condition is set, all you have to do is to set Send Emails Later to the guestNotification field.

You are all set now!
There are two autoresponders set in the demo form, one of them sends an email right away, and the other one will be sent a day before the date user chose at the Check-in Date. You can clone or examine this demo form and try this feature for yourself: https://www.jotform.com/82173057923963
You can also check the Spice up your email campaigns guide to see another use case of the Send Emails Later function.
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10 Comments:
I have a booking form and sometimes people cancel their booking. I have an automated email that goes out 1 day before their booking. Some people who've booked an appointment and cancelled are getting the email reminder.
When I cancel the booking I go to submissions and click the line with their details and click move to trash.
I've turned on, update email on my automatic emails under advance.
Why is it when I trash a submission the person still gets the email? How can I stop this?
We would like to get into contact with people who have filled out our form some months ago. Back then we have set up a immediate autoresponse email which people have received correctly.
Now we tried to go in again and edit the same form to have another autoresponder email to let the people update their submission and answer few new questions.
Unfortunately, those scheduled autoresponse mails did not get sent. What timezone is the scheduler set up to? What else can we try? thanks!
Thanks for the fantastic article. How can I prevent the auto-responder from getting sent out immediately if I don't fill out a date? The problem is sometimes a date is filled in, sometimes it's not. If I don't fill in a date it will send the autoresponse immediately instead of never.
I would like to utlize this logic flow, but using the appointment widget to create the conditional logic for a follow up email reminder, rather than the date picker.
From what I can tell, trying to get up the conditional formatting will not work with the appointment widget right now. Is that possible to do, or does this whole flow only work with the date picker?
Thank you!
I see there is the option to send at a later date. Can you please add the option to send at a later time? So that the autoresponse email can be delayed by say a few minutes or hours?
Hi,
I want to create an email notification workflow based on various overdue dates. This is for managing the close out of actions. I have not created the form yet.
I will have a form with actions that are required to be completed by a responsible person by a due by date.
I'd like the responsible person to receive an automatic email 2 days before the action is due to remind them that the action needs to completed.
If the Action is not closed out 7 days after the due by date then I'd like the form to send an email notification to the responsible persons manager. If the action is still not closed out 14 days after the due by date then the next manager up receives an email notification.
If the action is still not closed out by 21 days after the due by date then the next manager up receives an email notification.
If at any time the responsible persons edits the action form and adds a completion date along with what was done to resolve the issue/action, then this terminates the email notification flow.
Can this be done within Jotform without a third party widget or app?
Thanks
What if my guest canceled the reservation? How can I delete the "day before check-in" autoresponder for that reservation?
At what time does this send email?
I made an email responder yesterday that i want to actually go out to the full list of people yesterday. So I set the Send on a later date to the current date. It didn't send it yesterday though. How can I do this? Do I need to choose the Send date as at least one day later than I made the email?
Seems doable, but also seems WAY to complicated. My dates will change weekly. There is too much room for error. If this week im doing classes tuesday at 5pm only. and next week i am doing them wed a 6. and I only want to give 2 or 3 options to the form im driving the traffic too that are immediately looking to book. Is there an app that may be better than the form? Or an integration specifically for appointments and classes?