Skip to main content

Emergency email alert system for a team


There are many useful features in free email services that allow finding new use cases for electronic mail. In this tutorial we will review the process of creating the simple notification system in emergency situations using Outlook.live.com (Hotmail.com). For this purpose we need two functions that are available in email service: delayed delivery of message and rules for processing incoming messages. Similar functions exist in other email services, such as iCloud, Gmail, Yandex.mail and GMX.

The main idea of our system is to create and disable delayed email messages. If delayed sending will not disable by the user, emergency alert email will be sent at the specified time. In other words, if user cannot or does not want to switch off delayed sending, it means the occurrence of a certain event.

How to enable delayed email sending:



All delayed messages are placed in the Drafts folder in Outlook. You can disable sending of these emails there.

Let's add another mailbox to our system. It will be a "dispatcher" and marked as alert@example.com in the diagram below:



System works as follows:
  • user1, user2 and user3 compose delayed messages for address alert@example.com
  • when a message received, alert@example.com mailbox forwards it to user4 and user5
Let's have a look at setting up a rule of our dispatcher. The rule named Alert@example.com forwards all incoming messages that contain the word Houston in the subject line or message. You can also set other filtering conditions for the rule. 




All things done. In short time we have created our own emergency email alert system for a team.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project birthday

  Today is a special day. This day is a small anniversary for us. On April 8, 2020, the Enteex project was officially launched. There is a strange fact that the launch of the project coincided with the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, work on the project started back in 2019. Of course, then no one could have imagined what changes awaited us in the near future. Over the past year, more than 20 updates have been installed on the website, which were related to adding new functions, improving usability, fixing bugs, improving security. The project continues to develop, and we have big plans for this year. We will inform about all innovations on the pages of this blog. Stay tuned. Enteex team Photo by  Chris Lawton

Email 50th anniversary

  The history of the Internet as we know it goes back about 30 years. However, there is a technology that has a more respectable age. Year 2021 it's golden anniversary of electronic mail. First ever email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson , an engineer at the BBN company. The story goes that he did not create new software for these purposes, but managed to properly use several utilities for the ARPANet network, the precursor to the Internet. Electronic message was successfully transferred between neighboring computers. Legend has it that the message read as follows: "QWERTYUIOP". Also, noteworthy that Tomlinson first used '@' symbol in his early system. Internet technologies continue to evolve, but we are also taking advantage of inventions that were made 50 years ago.  Happy golden anniversary, Email!