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 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.
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 ....
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.
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).
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.
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
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
+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.
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.