Accepting Files from Web Visitors

Inboxes provide a web portal where visitors upload files to your site without logging in. This page covers what visitors see, the settings that control the experience, and how to pre-fill registration data and organize uploads into subfolders.

Inbox Web Interface

Visitors to your Inbox see a simplified upload interface that displays size and completion status for each file in progress, and confirms each upload when it finishes. Inbox uploads are encrypted with the same high-strength encryption as uploads from logged-in users.

Visitors who upload to an Inbox cannot see files uploaded by anyone else, and they only see their own uploads during their active session. Credentialed users who are logged in to the site and hold the appropriate permissions see uploaded files immediately.

Foreign Language Support

The Files.com web interface supports multiple 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

A range of settings controls how an Inbox is presented to visitors, what they need to provide before uploading, and how their uploads are organized inside the Inbox folder.

Web Portal Display Settings

Some Inbox settings change how the page looks when a visitor arrives at the Inbox URL. The Show on login page setting adds a link to the Inbox on the site login page. The Inbox description is optional descriptive text shown to recipients when they visit the Inbox page. The Help text is optional instructional text shown to visitors as they prepare to upload.

Inboxes use your site's customized colors and logo. When a custom logo is assigned to the Inbox folder, that logo replaces the sitewide logo.

You can also embed the Inbox in any web page.

Security Settings

Some settings determine what visitors must do before they are allowed to upload. The Require password setting forces visitors to provide a password you specify before they gain access to the Inbox.

The Clickwrap setting attaches an agreement that visitors must accept before they gain access. When the Inbox also requires registration, the Clickwrap text shown to each visitor is stored with their submitted registration information.

Preventing Folder Uploads

The Disable folder uploads setting restricts the Inbox to files only. When it is enabled, visitors cannot upload folders.

You can also use the folder settings on the Inbox folder to add further restrictions on the types of files that may be uploaded.

Collecting Registration Information from Web Visitors

Registrations let you track who accesses your Inbox. The Require registration option forces visitors to provide their contact information before they gain access. The Custom form setting attaches a customized registration form to the Inbox and supports advanced auto-organization of uploaded files.

When you collect registration information, you can also configure the Inbox to send an email receipt to visitors who upload files.

Pre-Fill Inbox Registration Information

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

The values you can pre-populate depend on how you make the Inbox available. An email invitation can only pre-fill the standard registration form fields. A direct URL can set the value for any field on the registration form.

Pre-Filling Inbox Registration with Invitations

The three standard registration fields — email address, name, and company — are automatically filled and read-only when the recipient follows the link from their email invitation, using whatever values you provided in the invitation.

Email invitations cannot pre-fill custom registration fields. When you use a custom registration form, share the URL directly with your recipients and pre-fill custom fields with query parameters.

Pre-filling Inbox Registration with Query Parameters

When you share a link to an Inbox directly instead of sending invitations, you can pre-fill any field on the registration form by adding query parameters to the link, not just the standard registration fields.

Query parameters are extra information appended to a URL, also called a query string. The first query parameter in a URL follows the question mark (?) character, and subsequent 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.

Both the field's label and the value must be URL encoded. URL encoding (also known as percent encoding) replaces characters that are invalid in links with characters that are valid. The space character, for example, is usually represented as %20.

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

Every form field type can be populated with parameters. The value sent in the parameter is decoded and then stored in the field. For a Date field, supply a value that matches an ISO-compliant date such as 2024-03-11 or 2016-04-17T19:28:01Z.

To apply the query parameters, append the full query string starting with ? to the end of the Inbox URL and share that URL with your recipient.

Automatically Organizing Uploads into Folders

To organize uploads automatically and prevent different visitors' files from commingling, enable the Separate submissions into subfolders setting. With the setting enabled, each visit that produces uploads creates a new folder for those files.

When Separate submissions into subfolders and Require registration are both enabled, the Subfolder name template setting specifies how the new subfolders are named. The template accepts a combination of text and placeholders that reference fields on the registration form, including your custom form fields. Special, reserved, and restricted characters cannot appear in the template.

The default subfolder name template is {{email}}, so the email address provided by the visitor becomes the name of the subfolder that holds their uploaded files. When the Subfolder name template setting is blank, subfolders receive generic numbered names (Submission 1, Submission 2, and so on).