I've since transitioned from a contact sensor to a motion sensor. I never quite liked how the contact sensor needed to be installed in our community mailbox due to the design that allows mail carriers to open the entire cabinet (all the doors) at once. It worked fine, but I was always a little concerned that the magnet would fall off, or the postal worker might knock the sensor off onto the ground since it needed to stick down below the opening a bit. Probably not very plausible, but I also wanted to try a Yolink hub and there was a good price available on a kit with two motion sensors and a hub. One caveat to using the Yolink motion sensor for this purpose is that it only reports motion active. So when it's joined via D2D with their relay, it can either turn the relay ON or it can turn it OFF. It cannot do both. The answer is to configure their relay for "Pulse Mode", but to do that you have to have their hub. The contact sensor and tilt sensor do not have this requirement since they can be joined to turn the relay ON in one state, and turn it OFF in the other state (i.e. contacted/not contacted or tilted/not tilted.
What I have learned is that the Yolink hubs do not have very good range, versus a device to device connection with their contact sensor. The motion sensor connection to the hub was only able to reach the end of my driveway (around 4 car lenghts), but beyond that it would stop responding. I tried all kinds of orientations and heights, whereas the D2D connection between the Yolink motion sensor and contact sensor reaches half a block away, with the motion sensor attached magnetically to a plate at the back of the community mailbox, which is nested in the middle of rows of other metal boxes. Very impressive range. The Yolink relay isn't mounted up high and didn't need any special orientation. It's just sitting on a shelf a few feet from my garage door, and yet it registers every time the mailbox door is opened. Changing batteries when its time will also be a lot easier since I'll just need to pull the magnetically attached sensor off its metal mounting plate.
