Email (SMTP)
Send notification emails via any SMTP server
Deliver notifications as emails through your own SMTP server. Full control over the sending infrastructure — use your existing mail server, Gmail, or any SMTP provider.
How it works
Configure
Add the channel in your Alphorn dashboard with your credentials.
Send a webhook
POST a JSON payload to your Alphorn webhook endpoint.
Delivered
Alphorn filters, routes, and delivers the notification automatically.
Use cases
- Daily digest summaries to stakeholders
- Critical alert escalation to on-call engineers
- Compliance and audit trail notifications
Configuration
- SMTP host, port, and credentials
- From and to email addresses
- TLS/STARTTLS support
Send your first notification
One HTTP request is all it takes. Alphorn handles routing to Email (SMTP) automatically.
$ curl -X POST https://your-instance.com/n/wh_abc123 \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"title":"Deploy complete","message":"v2.1.0 is live","priority":3,"tags":["deploy"]}'What Alphorn adds on top of Email (SMTP)
Wiring Email (SMTP)into your application directly is the easy part. What usually grows into a maintenance problem is everything around it — retries when the provider is having a bad day, backoff so you don't get rate-limited, fan-out to additional destinations when a rule fires, and an audit trail for compliance or debugging. Alphorn owns all of that on your behalf, so the integration code you write stays at one HTTP call forever.
Every notification is placed on a durable queue before it touches the Email (SMTP) API. If delivery fails, Alphorn retries with exponential backoff up to five times and records the failure in the delivery log. You can trigger a secondary notification when deliveries to a primary channel fail — for example, page an on-call engineer when a daily summary to a chat room stops going through. Filtering rules based on priority, tags, or JSON path expressions decide at runtime whether a particular payload reaches Email (SMTP) or gets routed somewhere else entirely.
The same rules apply whether you're on the managed edition or running Alphorn yourself. The self-hosted edition is AGPL-3.0-or-later and ships as a single container, so you can deploy the exact same delivery pipeline on your own infrastructure — useful for regulated environments where outbound notification data cannot leave a private network unencrypted.
Related email integrations
Alphorn can route the same notification to multiple channels. Pair Email (SMTP) with another email destination:
Start routing to Email (SMTP)
Free plan includes 3,000 messages/month. No credit card required.