Legacy projects often support legacy methods of alerting users that their home labs are in jeopardy — in email. Only that this method no longer flies. Not only do the notifications often get stopped by the automated spam filter, but these emails are also sent out by an anonymous SMTP server, not a certified known server. If you want an instant push-based notification, there is a tool for that.

Mailrise is an open source freely available “gateway” you may install on your existing setup, to convert outgoing email notification to a message on one of the supported platforms (via Apprise). My use case is to convert emails into Discord messages, where I have a channel per service so I can keep track of what is sending me notifications. Not the one-on-one push equivalent, but it gets the job done.

I may be asking too much of already mature projects to reconsider their SMTP-only implementations. Truth be told, emails did not age well at all as a reliable source of communication. There are layers upon layers of automation to make it work even in a professional capacity. For home or small office use, emails are either too slow or unreliable. Hopefully current and ongoing projects will openly consider more practical options than email.