---
title: Email Downtime Alerts
description: Alert emails with the diagnosis, expected versus detected values and confirming locations — plus the sender to allow-list so they never land in spam.
canonical: https://watchfor.io/integrations/email
---

[← All alert channels](/integrations)

# Email alerts that survive your spam filter

Email is the channel everybody starts with and the one most likely to fail quietly, because the message that matters arrives on the morning your filter decided it looked like a newsletter. So the docs name the exact sender to allow-list, and alerts carry the same diagnosis as every other channel rather than a bare subject line.

[Start free](/auth/signup)[Setup guide](/docs/notifications/email)

## Setting it up

Built-in default channel, on every account .

- 1 Nothing to set up: a default email channel exists on every account.
- 2 Add teammates to contact groups so the right people are reached for the right monitors.
- 3 Allow-list the sender named in the docs so alerts are never filtered.

The full procedure, including every optional field, is in the [setup guide](/docs/notifications/email).

## What the alert looks like in Email

A message titled like `🔴 DOWN: API (prod)` with the diagnosis, Expected versus Detected values, target, severity, start time, the confirming locations and a link to the incident. Recovery emails add the outage duration.

## Specific to Email

- Exists by default — nothing to configure before your first alert.
- Grouped summaries during a storm instead of an inbox full of near-identical mail.
- The sender address is published so you can allow-list it in advance.

## True of every channel

- Alerts fire on confirmed incidents, not on a single failed check, so one blip from one probe does not wake anyone.
- During a storm, several incidents inside the grouping window arrive as one summary rather than as twenty separate messages.
- Recovery closes the same thread it opened, with the outage duration attached.
- Every channel is on every plan, including the free one. There is no per-channel upsell.

## Questions people ask

Which address do alerts come from? A dedicated alerting sender, separate from product email, so you can allow-list it without whitelisting everything we send. The exact address is in the docs.

Can different people get different alerts? Yes, through contact groups: attach people to groups and route alert rules to the group that should hear about them.

Is email fast enough? For most teams, yes — but it is the channel most exposed to filtering and delay. If someone is genuinely on call, pair it with push, chat or PagerDuty rather than relying on email alone.

## Wire it up in a few minutes

15 monitors free, every alert channel included, no card required.

[Start free](/auth/signup)[See all channels](/integrations)

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Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/integrations/email · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt