Hi all, I don't think it's possible to do what I want to do without getting an outdoor motion sensor, but I thought I would ask the wiser-than-me members of the Hubitat community first.
I have a very simple rule that pings me a notification on my phone whenever my mailbox outside my front door is open (contact sensor) -- indication of having new mail. However, this also sends a notification when I open the mailbox to take it out (sometimes I need to take it out through the main drop point rather than just unlocking the mailbox, but that's beside the point).
I wanted to set up a rule that would only work if front door wasn't open (indication of me getting out of the house to pick up the mail). However, I'm struggling to think of a trigger, without having an external motion sensor that would pick up the approaching mailman, and then continue with some 'wait' command that would wait for the mailbox to be open.
I think you may be trying to over complicate this a bit too much. You could just use the built in notification app and set it to use the once a day option.
@Vettester - that’s not a bad idea but if I understand correctly this would only be good enough under the assumption that Mail can be delivered once a day. However, my mailbox can be a opened a few times in a day - by a Royal Mail postman, Amazon guy, etc.
Royal Mail means not in the USA; probably the UK? Here in the USA, that mailbox is technically illegal for anybody else but the official postman to put anything into (even neighbors, etc.). And it's enforced at least to the point where other package delivery services are careful not to use it. So the "once a day" suggestion kind of makes sense in the USA; it would do the right thing for most people most of the time. Rather clever.
But if other deliveries also show up there, then that's not going to work for what you want, no.
@dd-b -- that's very interesting! Yes, I'm in the UK (mandatory 'Royal' in front of everything) and as far as I can tell, people use whatever for their 'mailboxes'. I don't think it's regulated at all.
For older neighborhoods, mailboxes right on the house, it's pretty wide open what we put up, but whatever we put up then becomes the exclusive domain of US Post Office deliveries.
Lots of newer neighborhoods have boxes out on the street (which is great for the delivery person and sucks for the homeowners), and those are more regulated, so that they're consistently accessible from the window of the vehicle doing the deliveries. I've never lived in one of those, so I don't know the details. I do hear a lot of people complaining about those boxes being knocked over by snow plows, though! (The states I've lived in all have real winters.)
@dd-b - I've lived in the States for 10 years, including Maine, so I've seen snow. I had no idea about the US Postal Service being the 'owner' of the mailbox though. I always thought it was Europe that was overly regulated with Big Brother governments.
Just to be clear -- not sure they "own" it in that sense, but it's a (Federal!) crime for anybody other than the postman to put anything into it. Amounts to the same thing for all practical purposes though.
I had no idea about the US Postal Service being the 'owner' of the mailbox though. I always thought it was Europe that was overly regulated with Big Brother governments. 
