Emails or Certificates Not Sending

Why won't emails and/or certificates send to participants?

There are a few simple reasons why some certificates why participants may not receive an email:

• Automatic Certification is not currently turned "ON" in your exam (check the Certify'em controls). 

  • Note: This is not relevant if you are only Manually Issuing Certificates.  Automatic Certification only needs to be "ON" to automatically process new responses.

• You have not specified the passing percentage you intended.

• The participant is not actually passing the exam, perhaps due to a mistake in how you assigned points to questions in your Google Form.

• The participant may have entered an invalid or misspelled email address.

• The email is being sent, but is being rejected, or marked as SPAM, by the recipient's email service. To see if this may be the case:

  • • Check your Gmail "Sent" mail folder to see if you can find a copy of an email to that user. 

    • Check your exam's Certificate Records spreadsheet to see if you can find a record of the exam taker's submission(s).

If none of these simple reasons applies, consider these less frequent but still common issues and resolutions:

• If you or your organization uses Google Workspace (paid Gmail), and many emails are being rejected or bounced back to you, or simply never arrive, you may need to adjust your email content, or possibly settings related to how mail is configured for your domain. See this support article for help.

• You have exceeded a daily quota. In this case you should have received an email about this beforehand. Your quotas will reset after approximately after 24 hours. Read this article for more on daily quotas. 

  • • Note: The higher quota of 1500 emails / day for  Google Workspace users with Certify'em Platinum won't take effect until (1) your Workspace domain  has cumulatively paid Google at least USD $100 (or equivalent), and (2) at least 60 days have passed since reaching that payment threshold.
      So even if you're using Certify'em with Workspace, it's possible your actual quota is much lower if you only recently signed-up for Workspace.  You will need to plan for this time, and/or pay the $100 USD (or equivalent) early.  See this article for more on paying early. Also see this article for more about Certify'em and Workspace.

• You need to turn Automatic Certification OFF and then ON again to see if that resolves the issue. 

• If you have a large number of participants responding all at once (i.e. a class of hundreds of students all submitting the Google Form/Quiz within a few minutes of one another), it's possible Certify'em could be overwhelmed and thus fail to process some of the responses. If this happens, you can reprocess these affected responses later via the Issue Certificates Manually feature.

• You have other Google Forms Add-ons installed and enabled which may be interfering with Certify'em (such as FormLimiter). Disable or uninstall them. For instructions on how to disable or uninstall Add-ons, see here.

If none of these common issues seem to be the cause, you should also check:

• Do you still have "Owner" or "Edit" permissions on the Google Form/Quiz where you installed Certify'em? If not, certificates cannot be sent. If this was unintentional, have the person who now owns the Quiz add you back with 'Edit' access, or as the Owner. If that is not possible, then have that person uninstall and then re-install the Certify'em Add-on themselves.

• Is the Certificate Records sheet shared with the same account that was last used to turn ON Automatic Certification in your Form/Quiz? It's possible for these to get out of sync if you're using multiple Google accounts (i.e. work/school & personal) and have turned Automatic Certification OFF and ON again. The result may be that certificates get emailed out, but are unable to be recorded in the Records sheet.

  • Example: Automatic Certification was first turned ON while logged-in with person@company.com, causing the Records sheet to be created and accessible by that same account. Automatic Certification was later turned OFF and then ON again while logged-in with person@gmail.com. When someone next makes a submission, a certificate may be emailed out, but a record of it won't be written because person@gmail.com doesn't have access to the Records sheet (only person@company.com does). 

• Has the Google Form/Quiz been moved into a "Shared Drive" (formerly called "Team Drive"). If so, Certify'em cannot operate there, as it needs to be owned by the individual who installed and authorized it. Move the Form/Quiz from the Shared Drive back to your own account's Google Drive and if needed, uninstall and reinstall it.

• Check the Certificate Records spreadsheet for a sheet called "Errors", which may point to some other problem.