So, we, like many people before us were having problems with Gravity Forms sending out notification emails ... maybe it was the conditional logic ... i dont know ....
but what i do know ...
Our values of our drop down select box for the destination that the end user saw had < and > in them (we made them duplicates of how an email client presents it) ...
This caused GF's db calls to die on the back end side when it would try to do a query in the send process citing mixing of different collations.
Anywho, removing the < > from the values fixed this. Now just to figure out why notes isnt working :)