How notifications work
Document Blueprint communicates outward in three different ways — a Gmail draft we create in your own mailbox that you review and send yourself, an actual email we send for invites and billing, and an in-app bell-icon notification that never leaves the app. Knowing which is which prevents the surprise of "they should have gotten an email by now."
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Document Blueprint communicates outward in three different ways — a Gmail draft we create in your own mailbox that you review and send yourself, an actual email we send for invites and billing, and an in-app bell-icon notification that never leaves the app. Knowing which is which prevents the surprise of "they should have gotten an email by now."
This article exists because a lot of confusion lands here: a customer gets added to a case, their teammate sees a bell light up but no email, the customer never opens the app, and nobody is sure what was supposed to happen. The product's outbound model is intentional — different events demand different delivery channels — but the lines between them aren't obvious until you see the full picture.
The three channels
| Channel | Triggered by | Who sees it | Does an email leave Document Blueprint? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compose a Gmail draft | The Send / Compose Draft button on a case | The To/Cc recipients you enter in the composer | No — Document Blueprint creates the draft in your own Gmail mailbox and opens it in Gmail's compose view for you to review and send. The single-file Share button on a file uses your device's share sheet instead (no Gmail involved). |
| Real email | Inviting a teammate, adding a collaborator (worker or client) to a case, billing lifecycle (upgrade, receipt, cancellation) | The invited person, the customer email on the Stripe account | Yes — Document Blueprint sends it directly. No human review step. |
| Bell-icon notification | Activity in the workspace (case edits, file attachments, autofill runs, collaborator changes, portal form submissions) | All workspace members (workers + owner) | No — the message lives inside the app and lights up the bell icon. |
Channel 1 — composing a Gmail draft (Send / Compose Draft buttons)
When you click Send on a case (or Compose Draft in the batch action bar), Document Blueprint never emails on your behalf. It creates a real Gmail draft in your own Gmail mailbox with the recipients, subject, body, and attachments pre-filled, then opens Gmail's compose view in a new browser tab. You review, edit if needed, and click Send from inside Gmail.
This requires two things: your own Gmail connected at Settings → Integrations, and the Compose Emails capability granted by your workspace admin at Settings → Team. (Workspace owners always have it; workers default to not having it.)
The single-file Share button in the file review modal is a different path — it hands the file URL to your device's OS share sheet via the Web Share API, no Gmail involved. Use it when you just want to share one PDF without composing an email.
This is deliberate. Outbound email is high-stakes — wrong recipient, wrong attachment, wrong tone. The human-review step before sending is the cheapest insurance against those mistakes. It's covered in depth in Send drafts.
Channel 2 — real emails sent by Document Blueprint
Three things trigger an actual email send. None of them go through your Gmail; they originate from Document Blueprint.
Adding a collaborator to a case
When you add a worker or client as a collaborator on a case (the per-case Team or Clients panel), Document Blueprint sends them an email (via SendGrid) with a sign-in link to the portal. This is the email customers ask about when they say "we want to email a link to our client to fill out a form."
The email is templated — you can't change the subject or body — and the sign-in link goes to /portal/cases/... where the recipient signs in with the matching email address.
See Per-case collaborators for the workflow.
Inviting a workspace member
Sending a team invite from Settings → Account → Team triggers a real email with a one-time invite link. Like the collaborator email, the body is templated.
See Inviting workspace members.
Billing lifecycle (Stripe)
Three billing emails fire automatically against the address on the Stripe customer:
- Welcome when a paid plan is started
- Receipt at the same time, with the line items and amount
- Cancellation when a subscription is cancelled
These are best-effort — if they fail to send, the underlying action (the upgrade or cancellation) still completes. There's no resend button for billing emails today.
Channel 3 — bell-icon notifications (in-app only)
Most workspace activity fires an in-app notification visible from the bell icon in the dashboard header. No email goes out for any of these — only the bell lights up.
Things that trigger a bell notification:
- Adding, editing, or deleting a note on a case
- Attaching a file to a case
- Running autofill or generation
- Adding or removing a collaborator
- A client submitting a portal form
- A case being created
The notification fans out to every workspace member (the owner plus active members). The author of the change usually doesn't get notified about their own change — notifying yourself of your own edit is pure noise.
Important: a worker who hasn't opened the app in three days won't know about any of these events. No push, no email digest, no SMS. The bell icon is the entire delivery channel. If you need real-time delivery for something that happens in-app, the answer is to also use a real email — which today means inviting them as a collaborator (Channel 2) or composing a draft yourself (Channel 1).
Common questions
My client was added to a case yesterday but says they didn't get an email.
Check spam. The collaborator email is sent from a Document Blueprint domain, so it can land in spam if your client's mail server is strict. The portal URL is /portal/cases/{ownerUid}/{caseId} and they sign in with the email you added — you can also just paste that URL to them directly.
A teammate got the bell-icon notification but no email — is that broken? No, that's correct. Bell-icon events are workspace-internal and never trigger emails. Only collaborator-add, team-invite, and billing fire real emails. If you want a teammate to know about something specific, use the Send / Compose Draft flow to email them yourself.
I need a daily digest of activity emailed to me. Not supported today. Activity is always in-app. If this matters, file feedback — it's a known gap.
Can I send a custom email from inside the app? Only via the share-sheet flow (Channel 1) — pick Send / Compose Draft or Share and edit the resulting draft in whichever email or messaging app you route it to. There's no "send arbitrary email" path from within Document Blueprint, by design.
A billing email never arrived. Billing emails are best-effort and there's no resend. Check the email on file in Settings → Billing matches what Stripe has, and check spam. If the customer email is wrong on the Stripe account, the welcome/receipt/cancellation emails go to the wrong place — fix the Stripe customer email first.