Read and export your form submissions
Read every answer your signup form collects, narrow the list, push it into a contact list, export it as a file, and use it as consent evidence.
Your form has been out in the world for a few weeks and people have been filling it in. Everything they typed is sitting in one place, and most of it never leaves that place unless you go and look.
This guide is the whole of that screen: where the answers land, how to find the one you want, how to get them out as a file, and what happens to the contact record behind each one. The last part matters more than it sounds. A form submission is the strongest piece of consent evidence most workspaces will ever have, and Mailsoftly records it in two places that behave very differently.
Open the Submissions tab
Open Forms from the left sidebar and click the form you want. Every form opens on a row of tabs: Build, Style, Settings, Share and Submissions. The last one is where the answers live.
The screen splits in two. On the left is every submission, newest first, with a counter next to the panel title telling you how many there are in total. Each row shows the value of the form’s first field, usually a name, and the date it arrived. Rows read Submission instead of a name when that first field came back blank. On the right is a panel waiting for you to pick one.
Above the tabs you may also see a lightning bolt strip reading "Each response submitted to this form will trigger these automations", with a chip for each one. That is the product telling you what else fires every time somebody submits, and clicking a chip opens that automation in a new tab.
There is no analytics screen for forms. Mailsoftly does not record how many people saw the form or started filling it in, so there is no conversion rate to read anywhere. The submission count is the only number a form produces.
Read one submission
Click any row and its full answer paints into the right panel: the name and the date at the top, then every field as a label and a value.
Two things are worth knowing about what you are reading.
The labels shown are the labels that person actually saw. Mailsoftly stores the wording of each field alongside the answer at the moment of submission, so if you reworded a question last month, older submissions still show the old wording next to the old answers. That is what makes a submission useful as evidence rather than just as data.
If someone filled in your form after arriving from a campaign, an ad or a search result, you will also see rows the visitor never typed: Source Page, Referrer, and UTM Source, UTM Medium, UTM Campaign, UTM Term or UTM Content when those were on the link. Google Click ID appears for Google Ads traffic. These are captured automatically by the embed script and only exist when the visitor arrived carrying them, so plenty of submissions will not have any.
The trash icon at the end of a row deletes that submission permanently. There is no trash can, no undo and no restore, and the confirmation says exactly that. Export before you tidy up, not after.
Narrow the list down
Three controls sit above the list and all three work together.
The search box matches anything inside a submission: an address, a name, a company someone typed into a free text field, even the field labels themselves. It is a plain substring match, so typing part of a domain finds everybody from that organisation in one go.
The date input to the right of the counter opens a range picker with All Time, Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, This Month, Last Month, and a Custom range you drag out on the calendar. Picking a single day includes the whole of that day, not just the moment you clicked. Clear puts you back on All Time.
The two small buttons next to the search box sort by submission date, oldest first or newest first. At the bottom of the list, once you have more than twenty submissions, a per page selector offers 20, 50 or 100.
Watch the counter next to the panel title while you do all this. It starts as your total, then switches to the number of matches the moment you search or pick a date range, so it doubles as a result count.
When nothing matches, the list says so in its own words rather than looking empty. "No matching submissions" means your filter is too tight. "No Form Submissions" means the form genuinely has not been filled in yet, and it offers you a Share Form button.
Send submissions to a contact list
Tick the checkbox on any row and a bar appears at the top of the list with a live count of what you have selected, plus Select All to take everything on the page.
Press Add to Contact List and a picker opens. Choose an existing list, or create an empty one right there without leaving the screen, then Save. Mailsoftly works through your selection in the background: anybody who is already a contact is added to that list, and anybody who is not becomes a new contact first, matched on their email address so nobody is duplicated.
This is the catch-up tool. Most submissions already land in a list automatically, because the Settings tab has an Add to contact list option that does it at the moment of submission. This bar is for the ones that came in before you set that up, or for pushing a slice of your submissions somewhere new.
A submission only becomes a contact when it carries an email address that passes validation. If a form collects an address that Mailsoftly cannot accept, the submission is still stored and still shows on this screen, but no contact is created behind it. The Submissions count and your audience count are not the same number and they are not meant to be.
Export the answers as a file
There are two exports here and they are not the same thing.
Download Selected sits in the bulk bar next to Add to Contact List. Tick the rows you want, press it, and a spreadsheet downloads immediately. It also files itself in your workspace’s export history. If your Settings sidebar reads Import / Export History rather than Import History, open it and switch to the Export History tab: the file is listed there with the Type FormSubmission, and its name links back to the same file so you can fetch it again months later.
Export Submissions is the button at the top right of the screen. It exports the whole form, every submission it holds, and it does not use your search or your date range. Press it and Mailsoftly asks you to confirm, then works in the background and emails the file to the address you sign in with, attached as Submissions.xlsx. Nothing downloads in the browser, so watch your inbox rather than your downloads folder.
Both files are Excel workbooks with one sheet called Submissions. The first column is the submission date and every column after it is one of your form’s fields.
The columns come from your form as it looks today, but the values are matched to each submission by the field’s label. Rename a field after submissions have arrived and that column exports empty for every older row, because those rows still carry the old label. Nothing warns you. If you need to rename a question, export first and keep the old file.
If you cannot see either export control, exporting is not switched on for your workspace. It is off by default and support turns it on. Everything else on this screen works either way, including Add to Contact List.
Follow a submission to the contact it created
Open Audience, search for the address from a submission, and open that person’s profile. The Activity tab is where the form comes back.
A person who joined you through a form has a Contact created row, and underneath it the source in plain words: Form submission, followed by the name of the form. If your form carries the Email Subscriptions field, each box they ticked also has its own Subscribed row, naming the same form and the subscription it applies to. That is the sentence a reviewer is actually asking for, and you did nothing to produce it.
Two properties make this the part to rely on. These rows cannot be edited or deleted by anyone, including you, and they are recorded against the email address rather than against the contact record or the submission. The name of the form is stored as text at the moment it happens, so the row still reads correctly long after the form itself is gone.
The two records are separate and they survive different things. Delete a submission, or delete the whole form, and the answers are gone for good, including any ticked boxes and any source rows. The Activity trail is untouched and still names the form. Delete the contact instead and the trail survives that too, but you can no longer see it anywhere in the interface. Handle a data request is the order to do this in when someone asks to be removed.
Turn it into evidence you can hand over
For one person, the Activity tab is usually the whole answer. For a questionnaire, a grant application or a procurement review that asks about your whole audience, use the export that was built for it.
Open Settings, then Compliance, and use the consent evidence report. Pick a scope, press Download, and every contact comes back as a row with the date consent was captured, the source it came from, and the specific thing that source was. For anyone who arrived through a form, the source reads form and the detail column holds the form’s name. It reads those columns from the Activity trail, not from the submissions, which is why it keeps working after you have tidied up the Submissions tab.
Nothing in Mailsoftly deletes submissions on a schedule. They stay until you remove them, and deleting a form takes all of its submissions with it. Decide how long you want to keep raw answers, and keep in mind that the consent trail behind them stays either way. Prove your compliance covers both exports and the rest of the compliance page, and Understand a contact profile covers the other tabs on the profile you opened in step 6.
Ready to try it in your own account?
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