SMTP in YAML Phase out

Configuration
1

Upgraded to 2026.8.0, and see the SMTP warnings, I have 100s of custom automations with variables, states and other stuff, do we have to manually edit all the automatons to change the notification method now ? Seems a little crazy, as I have to redo every other automation since I use SMTP extensively as my notification method.

2

Yes you will have to edit all the automationsā€¦ just like everybody who uses Telegram Bot, Matrix, ntfy, Mastodon, File, and a bunch of others have already done for those integrationsā€¦ and just like everybody using pretty much every legacy notification integration will have to do eventually as those integrations get updated to the entity-based approach.

For any of your notifications where you are only using message and title, now would be a good time to switch to notify.send_message. For those that include html or attachments, youā€™ll need to use smtp.send_message.

There is one feature of the legacy actions which is not currently supported; neither of the new actions allow you to send the notification to any email of your choosing. They both require the user to pre-define ā€œrecipientsā€, i.e. notify entities that hold the target email address data for a specific instance of SMTP.

3

I would suggest give your automations yaml to a gemini/gpt and have it adjust all of it. Saves you a ton of work

4

I am using a lot of scripts and automations with the ā€œoldā€ notify method to send mails with attachments.

- data:
      title: Door Bell
      message: Somebody is ringing.
      data:
        images:
          - www/images/cp1001.jpg
          - www/images/cp1002.jpg
          - www/images/cp1003.jpg
          - www/images/cp2001.jpg
          - www/images/cp2002.jpg
          - www/images/cp2003.jpg
    action: notify.mail_benachrichtigung
    enabled: true

How to migrate this to
smtp.send_message ?
I have tried several possibilities but nothing works.

Thx
Walter

5

I find a solution.

Add the directory in the configuration.yaml:

homeassistant:
  media_dirs:
    images: /config/www/images

If you select ā€œattachmentā€ youā€™ll find in the media-source ā€œMy Mediaā€ with all the files of the directory.

6

I too have this same issue, and got a message indicating I needed to make changes by march next year. Seems like this should have been flagged in the Backwards incompatible section of the release notes! :slight_smile:

7

The legacy actions should continue to work for the next 6 months, so there isnā€™t currently anything ā€œincompatibleā€ about them. A ā€œBackwards Incompatible Changeā€ notice will likely be posted in the release where the old actions actually become incompatible.

8

Iā€™ve received the same ā€œDetected use of deprecated action notify.<smtp_action>ā€ Warning Reported by SMTP to address before 2027.3.0.

Are there any plans for some kind of automated ā€œRepairā€ feature (at least where there is no ambiguity in moving to either notify.send_message or smtp.send_message)?
Otherwise itā€™s a rather fragile (and onerous) manual find/replace through my automations.yaml.

9

Iā€™m going round in circles trying to convert legacy sending emails with attachments, repeatedly getting Error: expected a dictionary for dictionary value @ data[ā€˜attachmentsā€™][0][ā€˜media_sourceā€™]
I setup 'media sources in configuration.yaml -

homeassistant:
  allowlist_external_dirs:
    - /config/my-logs
  media_dirs:
    media: /media
    local: /config/my-logs

but I canā€™t see any files in either my Media\media or my Media\my-logs despite there being files in those locations. When I try an upload through my Media\media add the file browser is limited to supported files, which doesnā€™t apparently include logs or text files so it seems we have lost some functionality here, I used to email logs as attachments without issue. If anyone can point out where Iā€™m going wrong I would much appreciate it.

10

Finally sussed out attaching a log file to an email:

actions:
  - action: smtp.send_message
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: notify.mailsrv_recipient_email
    data:
      title: Daily energy log
      message: Here is the daily energy log
      attachments:
        - media_source:
            media_content_id: >-
              media-source://media_source/local/energy_daily_readings.log
            media_content_type: text/plain
            metadata:
              title: energy_daily_readings.log
              thumbnail: null
              media_class: text
              children_media_class: null
              navigateIds:
                - {}
                - media_content_type: app
                  media_content_id: media-source://media_source
                - media_content_type: ''
                  media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/.
          content_id: '1'

I just used standard file type descriptor values for media_content_type and media_class and it seems to work. Also I donā€™t seem to be able to do this from the GUI I had to fallback on yaml, but that maybe me. Seems unduly complicated just to attach a file so maybe I have misunderstood something?

11

WOW, I thought migrating the Gemini automations was hell, this is not going to be fun at all. I would think in this day and age, there would be automated migration path, for software that automate things this seems sillyā€¦ Maybe some one or something can whip a script that automates things, I didnt even try to convert anything yet, but by reading the above it seems to use the new media way which also is not easy to just reproduceā€¦

Besides running this thru AI, if someone can come up with a good way to automate the migration please drop a line below.