Plenty of systems still only speak email: NAS boxes, UPS units, printers, legacy CRMs, and uptime tools that predate webhooks. You should not have to stand up a mail parser just to hear about a failed backup.
AlertHub listens on sendalert.thealerthub.com. Send (or forward) a message to your project address and it becomes an alert — then Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, or Teams can pick it up.
How the address maps to an alert
| Email field | Alert field |
|---|---|
| Subject | ah_title (required — cannot be empty) |
| Body | ah_description |
| Recipient | Project secret key + severity |
| Sender | ah_source, prefixed with Email: |
Format:
{YOUR_PROJECT_SECRET_KEY}@{level}.sendalert.thealerthub.com| Level | Recipient |
|---|---|
| Info (default) | {key}@sendalert.thealerthub.com |
| Info | {key}@info.sendalert.thealerthub.com |
| Warning | {key}@warning.sendalert.thealerthub.com |
| Critical | {key}@critical.sendalert.thealerthub.com |
The key is the 64-character Project Secret Key from the dashboard. Full spec: email alerts docs.
Only warning and critical are pushed to external channels. Info stays in the feed so a noisy NAS does not wake the team.
Setup (once)
- Create a project at app.thealerthub.com and copy the secret key.
- Connect at least one destination (Telegram is the fastest on a phone).
- Send a test message to
{key}@warning.sendalert.thealerthub.comwith a non-empty subject.
Forwarded mail from Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail is unwrapped: AlertHub strips the usual “Fwd:” headers so the original subject and body become the alert.
Alert 1: Forward an uptime email
UptimeRobot, Better Stack, and many status tools can still email on down/up. Create a filter:
- From the monitor (or a dedicated alias)
- Forward to
{key}@critical.sendalert.thealerthub.com
The next outage lands in AlertHub and on every connected channel — without a webhook on that vendor.
Alert 2: NAS, UPS, and appliances
Home-lab and office devices often expose “send mail on event” and nothing else.
| Device event | Address | Level |
|---|---|---|
| Backup failed | {key}@warning.sendalert.thealerthub.com | Warning |
| Disk SMART failure | {key}@critical.sendalert.thealerthub.com | Critical |
| UPS on battery | {key}@warning.sendalert.thealerthub.com | Warning |
| Successful nightly backup | {key}@sendalert.thealerthub.com | Info (dashboard only) |
Keep the subject short; it is the title you will scan on Telegram.
Alert 3: Inbox rules as a poor-man’s webhook
When a SaaS has no webhook but always emails you:
- Create a Gmail or Outlook rule for that sender or subject prefix.
- Auto-forward to the warning or critical address.
- Restrict the rule to trusted senders so random mail cannot inject alerts.
For anything that can POST JSON, prefer the Ingestion API so the secret key never appears in mail logs.
Ideas to squeeze more value
- Manual page from the phone. Mail the critical address from anywhere when you need the rest of the team in the loop.
- Split noise. Digest-style newsletters stay off these addresses. Only operational mail.
- Same project as Stripe or Shopify. Operators see appliance failures next to payment failures in one feed.
- Healthchecks.io / cron. Those tools support both email and HTTP. Email is the fallback; HTTP is cleaner — see uptime monitoring alerts.
Security
Treat the recipient address like an API key. Do not paste it on a public wiki. Prefer trusted-sender rules. For server-to-server jobs, use HTTP instead.
FAQ
Does the body support HTML?
The body becomes the description. Plain text is the most reliable; forwarded HTML is flattened.
What if the subject is empty?
The ingest rejects it. The subject is the title.
Can I set source to something other than the sender?
Email ingest always prefixes Email: plus the From address. Custom sources belong on the HTTP API.
Next steps
Read the email alerts documentation, send one test from your inbox, then connect Telegram.
Related: uptime monitoring alerts · Ingestion API