Accepting Files from Web Visitors

Inboxes provide a convenient web portal for visitors to upload files to your site.

Inbox Web Interface

Visitors to your inbox see a simplified interface for uploading files. During the upload process, they can see the size and completion status of their uploads. When a file upload completes, the interface will confirm the status to the uploader. To ensure the security of all uploads to your site, Inbox uploads are encrypted with the same high-strength encryption as uploads performed by logged-in users.

People who upload to an Inbox can never see the files that others have uploaded, and they can only see their own uploads during their upload session. Credentialed users, who are logged in to the site and have the appropriate permissions, can see the files immediately upon upload.

Foreign Language Support

The Files.com web interface supports multiple languages. Currently, Files.com supports 6 languages: English, Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), Français (French), 日本語 (Japanese), and Português (Portuguese). Inbox pages are presented in your site's default language.

Inbox Settings for the Web

Files.com provides a variety of options that allow you to control how the web interface for an Inbox is presented to your visitors, whether they must provide password or other registration information, and how the uploaded files are organized within the Inbox folder.

Web Portal Display Settings

Some of the Inbox settings change how the web page looks when a visitor accesses your Inbox URL. If you enable the Show on login page setting, a link to this Inbox is displayed on the site login page. The Inbox description is an optional description for your Inbox. This text is displayed when your recipients visit the Inbox page. The Help text is optional, instructional text that will be shown to people who are viewing this Inbox and preparing to upload files.

Inboxes use your site's customized colors and logo. If a custom logo has been assigned to your Inbox folder, that logo will be used in place of the sitewide logo.

You can also embed the Inbox in any web page.

Security Settings

Some settings determine what steps visitors must follow before being allowed to upload. Enabling the Require password setting forces visitors to provide the password you specify before being granted access to this Inbox.

The Clickwrap setting lets you associate an agreement that visitors must agree to before getting access to the inbox. If your Inbox also requires registration, the text of the Clickwrap shown to each visitor will be stored with their submitted registration information.

Preventing Folder Uploads

The Disable folder uploads setting is useful when you want to restrict your inbox for files only. When it is enabled, visitors cannot upload folders to the inbox.

You can also use the folder settings available on the Inbox folder to add even more restrictions to the type of files that can be uploaded.

Collecting Registration Information from Web Visitors

Registrations allow you to track who is accessing your Inbox, and each Inbox provides settings to control how this works. The Require registration option forces visitors to provide their contact information before being granted access to this Inbox. The Custom form setting lets you attach a customized registration form to the Inbox, and allows for advanced auto-organization of the files that are uploaded.

If you collect registration information, you can also configure your Inbox to send an email receipt to web visitors who upload files.

Pre-Fill Inbox Registration Information

Pre-Filling Inbox registration data means that when your recipient visits the Inbox, one or more of the fields on the registration form is already populated. This saves time for your visitor and prevents them from changing values from what you expected.

The type of registration values that can be pre-populated depends on how you're making the inbox available. When you send an email invitation to your Inbox, only the standard registration form fields can be pre-filled. If you construct a URL that you share directly instead, you can set the values for any of the fields on your registration.

Pre-Filling Inbox Registration with Invitations

Any of those 3 standard fields registration fields for email address, name and company that you provide in the invitation are automatically filled out and read-only when the recipient follows the link from their email.

Email invitations cannot be used to pre-fill custom registration fields. If you are using a custom registration form, you can instead share the URL directly with your recipients and pre-fill custom form fields with query parameters.

Pre-filling Inbox Registration with Query Parameters

If you're sharing a link to an inbox directly instead of inviting people to it, you can pre-fill any field on the registration form by adding query parameters to your link, not just the standard registration fields.

Query parameters are extra information appended to a URL, also sometimes called a query string. The first query parameter in a URL follows the question mark (?) character, and subsequent query parameters are separated by ampersand (&) characters. Each parameter is the field's label followed by an equals sign (=) followed by the value for that parameter.

For each query parameter, both the field's label and the value must be URL encoded. URL encoding (also known as percent encoding) means replacing characters that aren't valid in links with characters that are. One example is the space character ( ). When a space is URL-encoded, it is usually represented as %20.

Form fields are matched to query parameters by the field's label. This matching is not case sensitive. A URL parameter named representative will match a field labeled representative or Representative or REPRESENTATIVE or any other casing. When you use the same label for more than one field in a custom form, query parameters will only match the first field with that label.

All of the different form field types can be populated with parameters. Whatever value is sent in your parameter is decoded and then stored in the field. When filling in a Date field, supply the value so that it matches an ISO compliant date, like 2024-03-11 or 2016-04-17T19:28:01Z.

To use the query parameters, add the entire thing starting with ? to the end of the Inbox URL and provide that to your recipient.

Automatically Organizing Uploads into Folders

To automatically organize files uploaded by your visitors, preventing different uploaders' files from commingling, you can enable the Separate submissions into subfolders setting. When the setting is enabled, each time a visitor access your Inbox and uploads files, those files will be placed into a newly created folder.

When both the Separate submission into subfolders setting and the Require registration setting are enabled for an Inbox, the Subfolder name template setting can be used to specify how the automatically created subfolders should be named. You can provide a combination of text and placeholders representing the information from the registration form, including your custom form fields, to name the new folders, but you cannot use special, reserved or restricted characters.

By default, the subfolder name template will be set to {{email}}, and the email address provided by your Inbox visitor will be used as the name for the subfolder their uploaded files will be placed in. If you leave the Subfolder name template setting blank, subfolders will be given a generic, numbered "Submission" name (Submission 1, Submission 2, etc.).