Is there any SMTP service that's easy to integrate?

Hi everyone!

First time posting here.

My deployment = Home Assistant running as a container on a Synology NAS.

So far so good … expect that I can’t get an SMTP integration to work for the life of me seemingly.

The ones I’ve tried:

  • Google Workspace (through the whole app creation process). I get:

“This service requires field message, which must be provided under data”

(but … populating some dummy text after data doesn’t help).

  • Mailgun: Thought this would be easy as it’s just an SMTP server. Added the credentials into configuration.yaml. Unfortunately the notifier doesn’t seem to register (can’t be called from services under dev tools).

  • Sendgrid … followed the instructions to integrate the service via the API key. This one gives me:

Failed to call service notify.sendgrid. expected dict for dictionary value @ data[‘data’]. Got None

Is there any way one that’s relatively dummy-proof (as apparently that’s what I am!). Everything looks great but getting any kind of email notification is integral to the automations I’m trying to set up.

(ETA: As so many different services are refusing to work, I’m beginning to wonder whether the issue has to do with something fundamental to my config or some other factor, which is why I’m posting!)

TIA!

Does it have to be email? I use Pushover to send text messages to our phones. For example if a water alarm goes off in our basement.

Thanks for the reply!

My end goal is to create a chore tracking system that will work with NFC tags (tap them to trigger the webhook).

All I really need/want is to have some record of what tasks were done (could be something as simple as a Google Sheet).

Thinking out loud, as SMTP integrations seem a bit finnicky, it might make more sense to configure the notifications from there.

i’m not clear on why you need homeassistant to send emails for recording nfc tags. i haven’t done nfc on homeassisant, but looking at the docs, it looks like just another trigger.

if you don’t care where that goes, you could use homeassistant’s “todo” list feature to track… essentially use the todo as a hasdone list instead :slight_smile:

however i do have both sendgrid and google workspace working and sending email to me. happy to help if i can. it was several years ago tho so my memory is fuzzy… sendgrid was easier, and google is in the middle of changing their policies, so i might be grandfathered in such that a new config done the way i did might not work (and might break in the fall).

but if you’d like… post what you’ve got so far so that we can try to debug it…

SMTP at HA is not realy working. Some time it goes, than the service is missing. After reboot of HA smtp is working - some times. smtp at HA is very unstable, do not rely on it.

With domoticz I had not one error over the years with smtp.

maybe something in your config. i’ve got it connecting to gmail and to sendgrid and both are extremely reliable for me. :person_shrugging:

I have been using smtp for almost 5 years, never had issues.

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I wondering too - i am using smtp on different devices like qnap nas, android, windows (even with outlook:-), debian … since years - only HA must have a reboot ~ all 2 weeks to working again with smpt. I will look to make a cronjob to reboot the HA on raspi every night - its like windows server :slight_smile:

I hope the code will in the feature be improved or HA is more gmail optimized. But I will not use the evil google inc. to send mails.