Dear community,
maybe you can help me. With my company we are thinking about starting a survey. It should be freely accessible to all people who come to our website and the customers are allowed to take the survey as many times as they want, there should be no limit here.
However, the survey is not the classic survey: does X apply to you, yes or no?
The survey should be there to help our customers with a decision. In the end the survey with branching should result in different predefined recommendations. We would like to make this result available to the customer via Email, it should not be directly on the page.
Now my question: is this generally possible with LimeSurvey? In general I think that the implementation of the survey itself could go well with branching, but with the mails I absolutely can't assess that.
I would be glad if someone could help me. Thanks for your help!

Now my question: is this generally possible with LimeSurvey?

Yes, this is possible. You need to repurpose the "admin notifications", there are two different ones, basic and detailed. Both have their own template, so you can adapt the text accordingly.
www.limesurvey.org/manual/Notifications_..._notifications_email

Within this template you can use Expressions to tailor the text based on answers given in the survey.

The field to where the admin notifications should be sent can also use expressions, so you can read an email given by the respondent into the field so that the email is sent to this email address.

Thanks for your quick reply, that's perfect! Then I know I will have to deal with Expressions when the time comes.

Other customers won't have a way to see the other emails with this method, right?
Is there any way for us to see who got the emails? We will probably be able to see the evaluation somewhere else, won't we?

Other customers won't have a way to see the other emails with this method, right?

No, not as long as you put their email address also in the field for the admin notification. The email goes to the email addresses that are in that field or that are piped into this field via expressions.

Is there any way for us to see who got the emails? We will probably be able to see the evaluation somewhere else, won't we?

Well, you can see in the results table who has answered your "survey" and thus you know who received the email. Because somewhere in the survey you need to ask for the email address, otherwise who would you send the admin notification to?

You could also put one of your email addresses into the field to receive a copy of the results email that the client received. Or you use the other admin notification (basic or detailed, depending what you used for the customers) and send a different report to one of your email addresses (e.g. your email could contain the results plus the email address it was sent to, and name, company, etc. if you asked that in the survey).

Ok, many many thanks!! That was already a huge help. I have now installed the program on our Hoststar server. When I get it working I will try to implement your tips.

dear rutertafjord, hello holch,

hope youre well and all goes all right at your hometown - hope that your hometown is dealing well with the covid19 things.

many thanks rutertafjord  for raising this question: 

well i am taking this - as i am new - as an advantage for learning: 
i am fairly new to limesurvey: i am trying to dive into this topic "e-mail". If i understand you right then you

maybe you can help me. With my company we are thinking about starting a survey.rutertafjord It should be freely accessible to all people who come to our
website and the customers are allowed to take the survey as many times as they want, there should be no limit here.
however, the survey is not the classic survey: does X apply to you, yes or no? The survey should be there to help our customers with a decision.
In the end the survey with branching should result in different predefined recommendations.

We would like to make this result available to the customer via Email, it should not be directly on the page.
 

if you are starting a survey.rutertafjord that is freely accessible to all people who come to your website and the customers are allowed to take the survey... then
you are able to gather results with the survey.

then you do not need to configure the e-mai settings here:

is this correct!? AFAIK - you do not need to set up the email config things!? is this coorect!?



cf www.limesurvey.org/manual/Optional_settings#Email_Settings

Email settings
All the settings from below can be overridden in the global settings dialog.

'emailmethod: This determines how email messages are being sent. The following options are available:
'mail:' it uses internal PHP mailer;
'sendmail:' it uses sendmail mailer;
'smtp:' it uses SMTP relaying. Use this setting when you are running LimeSurvey on a host that is not your mail server.
'emailsmtphost: If you use 'smtp' as $emailmethod, then you have to put your SMTP-server here. If you are using Google mail you might have to add the port number like $emailsmtphost = 'smtp.gmail.com:465'.
emailsmtpuser: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your user name, otherwise it must be blank.
emailsmtppassword: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your password, otherwise it must be blank.
emailsmtpssl: Set this to 'ssl' or 'tls' to use SSL/TLS for SMTP connection.
maxemails: When sending invitations or reminders to survey participants, this setting is used to determine how many emails can be sent in one bunch. Different web servers have different email capacities and if your script takes too long to send a bunch of emails, the script could time out and cause errors. Most web servers can send 100 emails at a time within the default 30 second time limit for a PHP script. If you get script timeout errors when sending large numbers of emails,

forums.limesurvey.org/forum/installation...-about-email-setting

cf manual.limesurvey.org/Optional_settings#Email_Settings

So unless you do not want to mail the results to the respondents - you do not have to configure the email-settings. 

but if you need to ... (and you take a gmail-account )
....Then you just have to add the port : smtp.gmail.com:465
And i think gmail use SSL or startSSL
You can test the eamil process with creating a survey with token and try to send you an email (even with a empty survey).
If your configuration are OK, you receive the mail.

Are my assumtions correct?

Look forward to hear from you 

best regards 
WP-Fan 2099  

@wpfan2099: Please do not ask the same questions in various posts. Stick to one, or even better, open your own.

hi Holch

first of all; many many thanls for the quick reply - great to hear from you.   Convinced.  I will do as advices and open my own question - regarding the necessity of working with E-Mails  for the very first survey (which is a pre-test.) 

I will do so in the next 24 hours - and come up with my own question! 

Meanwhile - many many thanks for the great support and the great experience you provide.  This commuity is outstanding - and your support is just awesome. 
keep it up.  - it rocks 

Regards WPFan 2099