Why no native Hubitat email send support?

Yep, it's been working perfectly for me too.

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Use case: I would like to send status emails to my phone provider SMS gateway (and more emails to a dedicated email account), and the number of SMS directly via Hubitat is limited to 10, and I do not want to depend on a PI or a charging web service.
Is this currently possible ?

grateful.

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Thank you Cobra. Very generous.
Initially, I want to explore if it is possible locally.

Hubitat no longer supports direct SMS, so that number is 0.

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Unfortunately, until HE includes an smtp client in the firmware, that is not possible

But also, email obviously requires the internet to send, so it will never be totally local

Andy

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If you want to send an email, you have to be connected to the internet. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to send an email.

Of course. What I meant was Internet connected but independant of paying web services and other computers on the local network.

I have my answer, it cannot be done at this time...

Thank you all.

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@rudy1 ....I'm right there with ya !

I'm old, but new here.

Having watched the HA space for YEARS I feel this box finally meets the threshold of price, facility, and "local-ness" I have been longing for. There were certainly other great efforts that came before, but I wasn't looking to make this into a full time hobby...I'm still not. Then it looked like the big Cloud subscription plays were going to usurp all local solutions until Hubitat brought back some sanity!

THAT SAID...call me old school for assuming SMTP was going to be "in the box" or otherwise that some local notifications could configured to be mirror emailed through the Hubitat Cloud (yes, w/ what dependence that places on Internet availability).

For many years I have used the basic features of Axis Video Servers for site observation, security, and yes...even some level of automation. Axis weren't the only ones providing enough "smarts in a small box" to do some pretty slick things. What was one thing common to them all? The lowest common denominator for remote notifications? SMTP It's not perfect but it certainly offered some flexibility and in today's world of Push/Pull/and Pokes :crazy_face: email is good "fee-less" redundancy.

I don't think asking for SMTP is like asking to bring back, gasp ...."punch cards" !

How's that for a first post to bring me ALL kinds of "remember when you said" flack in the coming year as I ask STUPID newbie questions. Remember now folks...be nice, I'm old. :rofl:

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Quite a few ISPs block outgoing connections to TCP ports 25 and 465 (to anything other than their own mail server). In a few extreme cases, outgoing connections to TCP 587 are also blocked.

It would be a support nightmare for Hubitat to offer "smtp in the box" when that function can be compromised by factors outside of Hubitat's control.

In any event, if the capacity to send email is essential for your use, use @erktrek's sendmail integration. I've been using it for ~6 months now. Works flawlessly, and I use it for all sorts of things including:

  • SMS notifications (via my mobile providers email-to-sms gateway)
  • Email notifications
  • Logging sensor values (and other things) to google sheets ....
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I was thinking about email sending. I always thought the simple solution was to use a provider like send mail ( it’s just a rest api)

100 emails/day free over api

Yeah, I'm still trying to understand if that port blocking is more a good thing or just a blatant affront to Net Neutrality (he says hoping not to sidetrack this thread!).

I have yet to experience blocking on 465 (had to change from 25) and maybe I don't understand enough how SSL email w/ account credentials & password handshake to understand why this would be a support nightmare for Hubitat.

As for sendmail integration, these great community contributions are a pillar of Hubitat. But like someone else said in this thread or another....there's a certain level of functionality that should not require additional knowledge, effort, or systems. I guess it comes down to agreeing what that "certain level" is and what/who the target market/consumer is.

Thanks for your reply.

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There are providers restrict access to their own servers with custom authentication ......

Edit:
And to be clear, there are native integrations offered for notifications - the Hubitat app, Pushover, Twilio (and I'm sure forgetting something else).

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I threw this together based of @ogiewon's Pushover driver for SendGrid. It's pretty basic but it gets the job done if you only need to send <100 messages a month and don't want to run your own SMTP server, and don't have access to an app to do push notifications. You should also be able to email your SMS address with it, but I haven't tested that.

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Can you msg me or email.me the driver. I have my own email server and will set up something similar. I was thinking of doing the exact same thing. Modifying a notification device I previously write to basically be a sendmail client

My drivers are all on my website https://cobra-apps.co.uk

However, the email driver was written to work with our servers in a specific way.
Without the back-end PHP/SQL of the webserver, I'm not sure that you will get it to work
It will not work as an email client for a normal email server.

Please note my apps/drivers are not open source.

If you have an email server then I believe that someone posted a driver to use telnet to send mail

Andy

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To anyone who wants to configure a RPI (or any other Linux device) to send out emails, I just found a VERY SIMPLE script that configures the Linux sendmail part in just a few simple steps. It just simply works.
(This can then be attached to @erktrek DoNS email stuff in Hubitat):
https://www.howtovmlinux.com/articles/rasberry-pi/raspbian-debian-wheezy/setup-ssmtp-in-raspbian-rasberrypi.html

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+1 for native SMTP support. This is a tried and true method that isn't dependent on cloud based third party services. It provides a free, unrestricted notification system that holds true to the "local" control I moved to Hubitat for. If we're honest here most people who use Hubitat are probably power users that can configure some SMTP settings to use their gmail account, or if their ISP is blocking those ports, they just use their ISP provided email account like suggested above.

I would love to see this implemented in the future.

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I agree that’s probably true of many users here in the forum, but staff have actually suggested the opposite is true of most Hubitat users.

This has been talked about before and i heard it was on the maybe list somewhere. An SMTP client offers significant freedom of choice than the alternatives (Twilio, Pushover or Hubitat)

Email has been around forever and it works, and people have selected providers based on many factors.

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