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Email

The one destination that needs no setup.

Email is a standard connection that is always present. There is nothing to add, no address to confirm and no credentials to manage. It is also the only destination that can follow your on-call rota or ask the recipient to acknowledge the incident.

  • Nothing to configure. Drop an Email step into a flow and pick a recipient. There is no connection to create first.
  • Follows the on-call rota. Turn on "use the on-call schedule" and the step pages whoever is on duty, in place of a fixed recipient.
  • Carries an Acknowledge button. The recipient can claim the incident from the email itself, which is what makes real escalation possible.
01 · Who it reaches

Your account, and your team.

Recipients are chosen from a dropdown rather than typed, which keeps the sending surface deliberately narrow.

Your account address

Always available, from the moment you create your first monitor. No verification step and nothing to set up.

Any team member

People you have invited to the account become selectable recipients, so a flow can page a specific colleague.

Only those addresses

Alerts can only be sent to your account address and your team members. There is no free-text recipient field, so a compromised account cannot be turned into a sending relay.

Whoever is on call

A step set to follow the rota resolves the recipient at the moment it fires, so the routing keeps up with the schedule on its own.

02 · Acknowledgement

Turning an alert into ownership.

Acknowledgement is what separates a notification from an assignment. It is available on email steps that sit on a down path.

Ask for acknowledgement

Turn it on in the email step settings and the message arrives with an Acknowledge button.

One click from the inbox

The recipient claims the incident without opening the dashboard first, which matters at three in the morning.

Escalate when nobody responds

Pair it with an If / else set to "not acknowledged in N minutes" and give the true path a second recipient.

Resets on recovery

Acknowledgement clears automatically when the monitor recovers, so every new outage starts fresh.

Visible where you look

Once claimed, the overview and the mobile view both show that someone has picked the incident up.

Stops the chase

If the first engineer acknowledges in time, the escalation path behind that branch never fires at all.

03 · The message

What actually lands in the inbox.

Custom subject and body

Write both in the step settings, so the alert reads the way your team expects rather than as a generic template.

Placeholders

Include values such as flow, state, detail and duration so the message carries the specifics without you writing them twice.

Once per incident

The default. The step fires once and resets on recovery rather than repeating through a long outage.

Flap cooldown

Fifteen minutes by default, so a monitor bouncing down and up does not re-send inside that window.

Questions

Common questions

Do I need to set up email before I can receive alerts?
No. Email is a standard connection that is always present, with nothing to add and no address to confirm. When you drop an Email step into a flow you pick the recipient from a dropdown of your own account address and any team members you have added.
Can I send alerts to any email address?
No, and this is deliberate. Alerts can only go to your account address or the addresses of team members you have invited. There is no free-text recipient field, which keeps the sending surface narrow.
How does the Acknowledge button work?
Turn on "ask for acknowledgement" in an email step that sits on a down path and the message includes an Acknowledge button. Clicking it marks the incident acknowledged, which you can then branch on with an If / else set to "not acknowledged in N minutes" to escalate only when nobody responds.
How do I page whoever is on call instead of a fixed person?
Turn on "use the on-call schedule" in the email step. From then on it sends to whoever is on duty at the moment it fires, in place of the recipient chosen in the step. Everything else about the step works exactly as before.
What happens if nobody is on call when the alert fires?
The step falls back to its own chosen recipient. A gap in the rota is a fallback rather than an error, so the alert is never dropped. The same fallback applies if no schedule has been saved yet or if the person on call has left the team.
Keep reading

Related features

Your first alert needs no setup at all.

Create a monitor, drop in an Email step, and you are already reachable.