How follow-ups work

A time of day when nothing goes out, set per rule with your timezone. The default is 9pm to 8am, which is the difference between a follow-up and a complaint.

Anything that comes up during quiet hours waits, it is not canceled. It goes out when they end. If you mark the lead won overnight, the waiting email is dropped before it sends.

Press Dry run next to a “no answer recorded” rule. It tells you how many leads would get the email right now, names some of them, and counts everybody it skipped and why. That last part is the useful half.

Nothing is sent. It runs the same checks the real thing does, so “nobody would get this” is a real answer and worth reading: usually it means nobody is due yet, or you have marked them all won already.

The usual reasons, roughly in order:

• The template is not approved. Only approved templates can auto-send, and editing one is a good moment to check.
• The rule is paused.
• For a timed rule: nobody is old enough yet, or you have been diligent and marked them all.
• For “big budget”: no threshold set, or your form does not ask about budget.
• Follow-ups are a Pro and Business feature. If a plan changed, queued sends stop.

The Emails panel on any lead shows every message it caused and what became of it: sent, delivered, opened, bounced, or failed with the reason.

Formala tries again, up to three times, with a gap between attempts. A provider having a bad minute does not cost you the email.

Two things are never retried, because retrying cannot help: a lead with no email address, and somebody who unsubscribed. And there is a daily ceiling of 200 emails per account. That is not a failure either; anything over it waits for tomorrow rather than being thrown away.

Two things, and neither is a rule you have to set up.

The confirmation goes to the visitor right after a chat, if you have it turned on in your form settings. It is short, it is signed off by your business rather than by Formala, and it is the same on every plan.

On Business, the AI reply writes a personal answer from the actual conversation and sends it about ten minutes later. It only goes out if the lead is still open when the time comes.

Yes, and what happens next is the part worth knowing, because it changes with your plan.

On Pro, you can ask for an AI draft from any conversation. It reads what was actually said and writes a reply about it, rather than filling in a template. It arrives as a draft for you to read, edit, and send. Nothing leaves until you press send, every time.

On Business, the same writing can also go out on its own about ten minutes after a chat, with nobody reading it first. That is the only difference between the two plans here, and it is deliberately the higher bar: it is the one thing in Formala that puts words in front of a customer without a person seeing them first.

Either way, it is skipped if you have already marked the lead won or lost by the time it is due.

Yes. A template has a plain-text message and, optionally, a rich version built from blocks: headings, paragraphs with bold and links, images, a button, a divider, and a tidy list of everything the lead told you.

The plain message stays required and becomes the fallback. That is not busywork: an email with no text version is treated worse by spam filters, and some people read mail in something that shows text only.

Press Preview to see it filled in with a real lead's details before you save.

Every follow-up does, and it is one click with no login. Anyone who uses it goes on your suppression list and is never emailed by you again through Formala.

You can see and manage that list on the follow-ups page. Bounces and spam complaints are added to it automatically, which protects whether your mail arrives at all.