My take on Notifications and what I am using and want

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1

With the recent issue with iPhone not getting notifications, I have been trying to find alternatives to make sure key notifications can be detected and not missed. This is a summary of my findings and wish list for Hubitat to address:

Types of Notifications:

  1. Low - Basic items - Doors opening and closing etc. Good to know when you are not home
  2. Critical items - Water Leaks, sirens go off, Temp, etc.
  3. Medium - Temperature alerts - So that you don't have pipes freezing and turn on heaters, etc.
  4. Need to act on - Battery levels that will need to be replaced

Notification solutions Tested:

I have played with two options to supplement Hubitat that do have a Fee to use to improve notification capability:

  1. Pushover - Used to let me know about Temperature items, battery levels and Leaks
  2. IFTTT Pro - Call me on water leaks and "Critical" items
  3. SMTP Email - I would use for Temp to plug in heaters and Battery so I can order batteries if needed
  4. Hubitat Notifications - Basically works with the exception of current iPhone issue, but Critical, Temp and Battery alerts get lost among all the normal notifications

IFTTT lacks some needed options like Battery Levels that I could have emailed if they had a trigger for. I use this for Temp to remind me to plug in a heater in my outdoor water filter box. I made a request for this when I set up Pro to get 20 Applets for phone call notifications for leaks and email for Temp issues

Pushover does not have an option to send you an email. You can use an email to make Pushover send a notification to your phone/device/browser, not sure what to use this for.

Hubitat SMS and email driver projects just did not work as you have to have a basic SMTP server at your home/location, which I have on my NAS, but I am NOT opening it to the internet for obvious security reasons.

Conclusion:

Pushover is basically the same as Hubitat notifications, but can do more than just send to your phone, you can get them to your desktop if you choose. Cheap enough, but does not really solve much except I only have Critical, Temp and Battery going to Pushover, less events so hopefully more visibility for these items. Also they stay around longer than Hubitat notifications on your phone.

Wish List for Notifications:

IFTTT does not have enough Hubitat options to trigger Battery levels and other devices to send an email to remind you to plug in pipe heaters and get and/or replace batteries

Hubitat notifications are not enough for the level of notifications we need when having a robust smart home. Hubitat badly needs an email/API option for sending secure email that is required now by email providers like GMail etc. Hell.. I would pay for it...

Wish List:

Hubitat - Add notification levels for Low, Medium and High notifications. Going to your phone as it does now does not provide much of an option, so would need to be another solution guessing
Hubitat - True SSL/TLS email API option to send emails for things like Battery Levels, Leaks, etc.

IFTTT - Add more trigger items for devices like Battery level, etc. Anything in a Dashboard should have an IFTTT trigger option.

Pushover - Add TLS/SSL Email API to send email for items you want alerted.

This is my take from testing all the options. Let me know if you have anything else working, but I hope this helps those wanting more options for notifications.

Cheers.

2

My take:
Ditch IFTTT. You can do it all using a Node-Red instance to also send Pushover messages and/or email. One Pushover acct, with it's one-time cost, can be connected to more than one source.

Node-Red runs on any always on computer you might have. Mine is a headless Mac Mini that has a primary use as a media center.

One search result, as an example:

3

But that is not native to Hubitat. You have to get a Pi/PC and install it and do all that shtuff. Most will not do that, I even have a Pi running my Solar Assistant and MQTT to my Log Mgmt soluton, but not going to add that for this need. It needs to be more of an add on Driver/Device that Hubitat can natively use like Pushover and IFTTT. Maybe I should have stated that in the post... I guess I just did.

I agree if I could replace IFTTT, I would, but it is the only easy Email and Phone call option any user could add... We may be techies, but many are not. Also when I sell this place in a few years... good luck explaining Node-Red to a new homeowner...

And guessing it has to remain in the home... So if I put it on my lappy and travel.... Likely not going to work is it? And Digital Ocean??? more malware is served up in their systems than Go-Daddy... ;-D Wonder if the Dashboard can show home much C2 and malware is in the DO servers.. ;-D

But thanks for the idea/option.

4

Have you looked into Sendmail...no requirement for anything except an email address.

5

Node-Red will be a great addition to that Pi.

Type "node -v" on your Pi. If it answers, you're half way to having a Node-Red instance.

6

What does this refer to?

7

The iPhone notifications have disappeared with some update, it is a known issue and the next App update should resolve it. Seems to come and go. Mine stopped working for a couple weeks. iPad works fine.

8

Hmm, I didn’t realize, but I don’t use the Hubitat for a ton of push notifications.

Seems they may have fixed the issue you’re referring to a couple weeks ago in the Testflight beta version of the app.

9

Cant you configure pushover for different priority levels and different notification sounds? Have not used it myself yet but I have considered switching to it for that reason.

10

Yes, highly configurable push notification options, depending on the priority level one uses when sending a notification.

11

Including emergency priority that plays a sound even if the phone is silenced.

12

If you have a Gmail account you can send Gmail notifications from HE using my community solution:

13

ritchierich, Your instructions need serious updating as the screen shots do not match Google at all and it is a struggle to find all the things to enable this. My first attempt failed miserably as Google has changed things a LOT.

14

Suggested instructions for working with community developers:

  1. Thank them for their hard work, which they do in their spare time and share for free with the rest of us
  2. Avoid making demands (see above re: working for free)

Making demands and not showing any appreciation is also an option. But not a preferred one IMO.

15

So I managed to get it to work... Boy the instructions could be more clear, but it does send me Emails as expected as a Notification device solving one of my problems.

Thanks for this, but might go through the steps and screen shots again and add text in the page vs in an image to avoid typos as you pointed out. Also put an example of what the Client key looks like that includes the URL portion for clarity. Might have all the Hubitat steps together so you don't have to jump around the instructions to install the drivers. This could be done sooner versus the bottom.

I tried using the ATT SMS email and that does not seem to work, so only Gmail emails it seems. I could setup a Rule to forward a certain type of message.

16

LOL.. true dat... THANKS for this as it works... You could charge a small fee for this IMHO... worth it to have email notifications. ;-D

I demand nothing... I just request :wink:

I have free Windows Logging Cheat Sheets if you want to log Windows better ;-D

17

It just dawned on me that you have to use @mms.att.net for email to phone text messages and that works as a device !

Progress...

Thanks for your App @ritchierich it has solved a problem I needed.

18

I agree, notifications could use additional flags such as priority and categorization.

20

Sorry for this, I haven’t been through the setup myself in several years and no one has mentioned this to me. It’s a one time thing setup and I rarely go into the Google Console so depend on people to either let me know or create a pull request in GitHub and suggest edits.

I have been actively enhancing the GCal search app for many years and if this is directed towards my app please feel free to suggest enhancements within the main thread with more detail.

21

I think it is working as expected, so nothing as far as Email goes which is what I am after. The setup is a bit hard for non-techies.. I am a techie and struggled only because Google changed so much, but being I have a clue with what was needed I was able to struggle through it.

Functionality Wise the Email is working as I would expect and the MMS vs SMS tweak allows me to get texts too on my iPhone.

This all happened because my iPhone is/was not getting notifications so batteries were dying and I had no way to know except for my Dashboards. So I set out to find an option for Email or other alerting. Node-Red is a PiTA as far as rule creation, not intuitive at all so nice this runs on the device and does not require another device... a major reason WHY to use your App.