Email notifications
Overseer sends email through a mail server that you provide. This page covers the outgoing mail settings, how to test them, and where you choose which maintenance sessions send email.
How Overseer sends email
Overseer can email people about maintenance activity. It does not run a mail service of its own. You give it the details of an SMTP server, and it sends through that.
Three things have to be in place before any email goes out:
- Outgoing mail settings. The server Overseer sends through. This page covers them.
- A brand. The From address and the look of the message come from the tenant's branding.
- A notification choice. A deployment or a schedule that asks for email to be sent.
Notifications are found on the Notifications screen, under Show more.
Settings for each tenant
Outgoing mail is set tenant by tenant. A tenant is the record Overseer keeps for one of your clients. Start with the default settings. They are used for any tenant that has none of its own, so one working set covers every client from the first day.
Add separate settings only for a client whose email must go through its own mail server.
| Setting | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Tenant | The tenant these settings apply to |
| Host | The address of the SMTP server |
| Port | The port the server listens on. This is commonly 587 or 465, and sometimes 25 |
| Timeout | How long Overseer waits before it treats a message as failed |
| Authentication | The user name and password Overseer uses to authenticate to the server |
| Encryption | Whether the connection to the server is encrypted |
Setting up outgoing mail
- 1Open the outgoing mail settings.
- 2Choose the tenant. Start with the default.
- 3Enter the host and the port your mail provider gives you.
- 4Turn on authentication and enter the user name and password.
- 5Turn on encryption if your server expects it.
- 6Send a test email. Enter an address to send to and an address to send from.
- 7Confirm that the test arrives, then save.
If the test does not arrive, check the host and port first, then the account details, then whether your mail server allows that account to send from the From address you used.
Setting who the email comes from
The From address is not part of the outgoing mail settings. It belongs to the tenant's brand, along with the colours and the logo.
If a client sends through its own mail server, give that client its own brand as well, so the From address is one its server accepts.
Choosing which sessions send email
Working mail settings do not make Overseer send anything by themselves. You ask for email in one of two places.
- On a schedule. Each schedule has notification options that apply to the sessions it starts.
- On a deployment you run by hand. Edit the deployment and set its notification options before you run it.