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Send HTML form submissions to Telegram

Telegram is a handy place for form notifications: they reach your phone instantly and are easy to share with a group. sendm8 sends each submission through a Telegram bot you create, so the messages come from your bot, into the chat you choose.

What you need

A Telegram account and a free sendm8 account. Creating a bot takes a minute and costs nothing.

Create the bot

  1. In Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot and follow the prompts. It replies with a bot token that looks like 123456789:AAH…. Keep it private.
  2. Decide where messages should go. For a private chat, open your new bot and press Start. For a group, add the bot to the group.
  3. Find the chat id: send a message in that chat, then open https://api.telegram.org/bot<your token>/getUpdates in a browser and look for "chat":{"id":…}. Private chats have positive ids; groups have negative ones, like -1001234567890.

Connect it to your form

  1. Sign in to sendm8 with GitHub or Google and create a form. You get an endpoint like https://sendm8.com/f/k3x9q2m7ab. (Email-in-the-URL endpoints deliver by email only; channels like this one live on dashboard forms.)
  2. Open the form’s Settings → Channels, add a Telegram channel, and paste the bot token and chat id. sendm8 checks the bot can see that chat before saving it.
  3. Click Send test. Your bot should message the chat straight away.

The form

contact.html
<form action="https://sendm8.com/f/k3x9q2m7ab" method="POST">
  <label>Name <input name="name" required></label>
  <label>Email <input name="email" type="email" required></label>
  <label>Message <textarea name="message" required></textarea></label>
  <input type="text" name="_gotcha" style="display:none" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off">
  <button>Send</button>
</form>

What arrives

Your bot sends one message per submission, with each field on its own line, a link to the submission in your dashboard and download links for any uploaded files. Field values are escaped, so nothing a visitor types can change the formatting or hide a link.

Spam stays out of your chat

The honeypot, rate limits (10 submissions a minute per visitor), spam scoring and an AI check run before delivery. Flagged submissions go to the spam folder in your dashboard instead of buzzing your phone.

Telegram alongside email and other channels

Each form can have up to 10 channels, so the same submission can go to email, Discord, Slack, Telegram and a webhook at once. Chat and webhook deliveries are unlimited and don’t count towards the daily email allowance. A failed delivery is retried after 1m, 5m, 30m, 2h, 12h, and the dashboard shows each attempt on the submission.

Questions

Why does sendm8 need my own bot instead of a shared one?
Your own bot means messages come from a bot you control, into chats you choose, and you can revoke it at any time with @BotFather. A shared bot would be able to see every customer’s chats.
Can submissions go to a Telegram group or channel?
Yes. Add your bot to the group, or as an admin of the channel, and use that chat’s id. Group and channel ids are negative numbers.
Is Telegram delivery free?
Yes. Telegram, Discord, Slack and webhook deliveries are unlimited on every sendm8 account.
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