Accepting Files from Web Visitors

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.).

Inboxes can be attached to Share Links, allowing a Share Link to provide two-way data transfer. To achieve this, create the Inbox first, then attach it to the Share Link during Share Link creation.