title: "Email alerts" description: "How BoxWatch delivers alert email and how to manage the recipient list." last_updated: "2026-05-24"

Email alerts

Email is on by default for every account. The address you signed up with receives alerts immediately, no setup required.

The recipient

BoxWatch sends alert email to the address on your user record — the same one you log in with. Change it at Dashboard → Account → Profile. The new address has to go through email verification before alerts start landing there.

ℹ

Adding multiple recipients per account isn't shipped yet. If you need a shared mailbox, set your account email to an alias like [email protected] and forward it from there.

What you'll receive

Alert emails come from [email protected]. The subject line names the entity and the alert reason — for example:

[BoxWatch] cpu_high on web-prod-1 (94% > 80%)
[BoxWatch] Missed run: Nightly Postgres backup
[BoxWatch] Check down: api.example.com (HTTP)

The body is a short HTML email with the server or check name, the reason, and a deep link back to the relevant dashboard page. Plain-text alternative is included for terminal-only mail clients.

When email fires

Email is one of several channels BoxWatch fans out to. If you've also configured Slack, Discord, or a generic webhook, email fires alongside them — they don't replace each other.

Recovery emails (e.g. uptime_recovery) are sent for uptime checks but not for server metrics. Server-metric alerts clear silently when the value drops back below threshold.

Frequency & dedup

You'll get one email per state transition, not one per polling tick. A server that goes down at 03:00 produces one alert email at 03:00, then nothing until something changes. See state-transition deduplication.

If a maintenance window is open, alerts are suppressed at the dispatcher — no email is sent, but the state transition is still tracked.

Digest mode

Switch from immediate alerts to a digest at Dashboard → Account → Preferences → Alert mode. Set to digest and pick a cadence:

weekly — every Monday morning
monthly — first of the month
both — both

Digests roll up everything that fired during the window. Useful for hobby plans and side-project servers where you'd rather wake up to a summary than a 3 AM push.

Deliverability

If alerts aren't landing in your inbox:

Check spam. Whitelist [email protected].
Confirm the email on your account is verified. Unverified accounts don't receive alerts.
Open Dashboard → Alerts → History — if the row is there but the email never arrived, it's an inbox problem, not a BoxWatch problem.

For corporate mail systems that drop unauthenticated mail, ask IT to allow our SPF record (v=spf1 include:_spf.boxwatch.app ~all).

Disabling email

Email can't be disabled at the channel level — it's the fallback for account recovery and billing. To stop alert email specifically, switch your account to digest mode with frequency: none, or use generic webhooks exclusively and route them to the channel you actually want.