Not receiving email alerts

[TheMayor207]

I have been using the same email address for a few years. 5pm yesterday my email alerts stopped. Push alerts are still working fine. I have verified my email address, cycled email alerts on and off, restarted my base station etc. 

nothing is working 

[JamesC]

The Email alerts feature is at end of life and will no longer be supported.

You can read more about the Arlo end of life policy here: https://kb.arlo.com/000063018/Arlo-Legacy-Cameras-End-of-Life

JamesC

[meizydavid]

so on July 13 of 2020 Arlo removed the preview pane from in the email notifications

at that time I contacted via email investors@arlo.com and complained and stated

that on the Arlo message boards along with twitter were complaining fiercely

I also found out who was running the company at the time CEO

can't remember his name !

But he reversed the course and fixed it back to the way it was...

The loss or threat of loss is the only way to get them to reverse course....

If its about money give us the option to pay for it

[meizydavid]

The CEO is Matthew McRae same as in 2020 issue of removing the preview plane

in the email notification

[steve_t]

So while email notifications for motion are gone, they still send them for low battery. Strange

[karolo]

What about SimplySafe? Any experience with their cameras?

[TheMayor207]

I still get low battery email alerts……🤦

[Hallelujah]

You note also that community thread responses are posted on email ... obviously got their sense of priorities quite backwards ...

[Efthos]

How ironic that I keep on getting email ads from Arlo on their products.  There is a complete disconnect with this company.  I assume that any new customers will not know about the former email alerts, so it will not be an issue.  However, how can you trust that Arlo will not pull another zinger.  If at least they had better customer support other than through their chat line, there would be some hope.  

[Mbambi28]

It's even more ironic that I have gotten about a hundred emails for alerts to responses in this post, but I can't get emails to notify me on camera activity. 

[EagleI]

Ditto.  Thanks for posting.  

[Hckyguy1]

Arlo really does suck.   Cameras don’t work half the time, have to be rebooted or reset, and give a ton of false notifications.   Now I have no email alerts but have constant false push notifications for nothing.   And the push alerts only work when I’m home.   Pathetic 

[lywaz]

Yeah, about those push notifications...I get them, but the person I've granted access to the devices no longer gets them. Utterly useless. 

I'm testing an inexpensive light bulb camera today (making sure it works before I gift it), should be interesting. 

[TomMcBride]

I was shocked when Arlo, without any warning, deleted the option to send email notifications when motion was detected. This feature was crucial to my use of the camera. The email notes contained the date, time, and — absolutely critical for my application — whether the detected motion was for an animal, person, or vehicle. My notification emails were received by a program which took different actions depending on what was detected. My home is in an area that involves many roaming deer that delight in eating plants in my back yard. When an animal was detected, I turned on my sprinkler system for that area for five seconds and the deer scurry away. If a person is detected, the sprinkler system is not activated unless it’s after dark. 

Without the email notifications I have no way to operate my application. Arlo does support a trigger on IFTTT which can be used to send an email when motion is detected but it does not identify the type of motion detected and so is of no use to me. 

I bought this camera specifically because it made it possible for me to create this protection system for my back yard and I pay for the subscription so that I can distinguish the various types of motion that it detects. Push notifications are now the only option which I get on my phone if I happen to have it with me but they are of no real use to me. Clearly, many other camera uses are surprised and unhappy that the email notification option has been withdrawn. I must join others who want the feature reinstated. I bought the camera for its features and now this important one has simply been deleted. What must be done to convince Arlo to add this feature back? To me, it’s a bit like having purchased a car, driven it for a while only to have the manufacturer cancel the headlight feature so that night driving is no longer possible. 

To be precise, I need a way for a program to be notified when motion has been detected and what caused that motion, whether animal, person, vehicle, etc. One possible solution would be to improve the Arlo IFTTT trigger to provide that information. There are perhaps other solutions but I need something. Meanwhile, I think you owe some kind of compensation to people who bought the cameras because of a feature that was then withdrawn. At the moment I’m trying to find another camera that could be used in my application. If any other reader of this note has found one, I’d appreciate it if they would post the information.

[SAStiner77]

Due to suddenly losing access to all of my cameras, I recently had to resort to removing my Arlo Pro cameras from my Arlo Secure app and resetting my base unit (VMB4000) to factory defaults.  Since doing that and then adding back all of my devices, the Email Notification function is missing as an available notification function in the rules.  Can you tell me what might have caused this and what I can do to restore this notification function? I relied on those email notifications as much as I do the push notifications. Thank you. -- Stephen

[StephenB]

---

@SAStiner77 wrote:

Due to suddenly losing access to all of my cameras, I recently had to resort to removing my Arlo Pro cameras from my Arlo Secure app and resetting my base unit (VMB4000) to factory defaults.  Since doing that and then adding back all of my devices, the Email Notification function is missing as an available notification function in the rules.  

---

It's not related to your reset. Unfortunately, Arlo decided to remove the email notifications for alerts a few weeks ago.

[Davb001]

Hello. Recently Arlo has done away with the email notification option and gone to push notifications only. Push notifications are very short and quiet, which is bad if you want to be woken up at night if someone is trying to break

into your home. With email notifications I was able to turn that into a text alert and then set the alert sound to whatever I like, like a ringtone or something persistent and loud. I’m not sure why the only option is push notification but it would be nice to have more options for text or maybe just a sound that will wake me up at night. I see they added 2 new sound options, but they are both short and quiet (not enough to wake anyone up at night).

Also, text notifications can be set to bypass iPhones “do not disturb” function which is also nice so I can keep my phone on silent but still receive arlo notifications if someone sets off a camera. Please, please, please, add an option for text notifications. That would solve all these issues. Thank you so much.

[Jdub62]

So similar to other posts in the community, Arlo chose to turn off email notifications.  I spent an hour trying to figure out why I wasn’t getting email notifications, then opened a chat and was told “too many people were complaining about email notifications, so they removed it.”  Not true.  You can turn them off with a toggle.  When I opened a case with them, I learned they hid a notification of this in the EOL- a completely wrong place to put the discontinuation of a service, and they continued to tout it as an enhancement.  When I asked how taking something away was an an enhancement, I got the standard language around EOL.  When I asked why they chose to do this, I got nothing.  Corporate has taken over.   Had I known they would discontinue the email notifications I would not have purchased new cameras and do not plan on buying Arlo in the future.  It’s just bad business hiding things like this and not asking your customers.  Please join me in posting on this subject to make some noise so that Arlo reconsiders and warning those who are thinking of buying to think twice- what you think you’re buying can get unilaterally changed without notice and without consult.

[JCC60]

This is absolutely disgusting.  We have 2 homes outfitted with Arlo Cameras as we travel extensively.  We have "house sitters" for boh homes that we had arranged to receive email alerts in addition to our personal email addresses.  Now we have no way of knowing if there's a problem at either house and no way for our "house sitters " to know so they can alert the police.   One of the main reasons we selected Arlo was fo the email alerts with the attached videos so we would be able to quickly determine if there was a problem or not.  Push notifications don't do that.  In other words I am the proud owner of over $1,000 worth of paper weights.

I note you don't have a problem with using email spam to clutter up  my inbox with your sales and promotions, but using email as a service to customers who have paid a lot of money to you is just too much to expect.

I will now make it my business to let anyone I know that is considering home security systems not to use Arlo.  I have access to several Community Message boards that reach 10s of thousands of households across the US and Canada and I will begin posting what an untrustworthy company you are first thin in the morning.

[TomMcBride]

When I looked at using IFTTT a couple of years ago, I only found one applet for Arlo that would trigger if motion was detected which, at least for my application, was worthless. My program that receives and analyzes the email notes needs to determine what was detected. In the past the notes directly from Arlo solved that problem. Now that this feature has been removed, I looked at IFTTT again. There is an Arlo app which allows one to specify animal, person or vehicle and only triggers on the one you select. Today I rewrote my program that processes emails and my system is now working again. I used the IFTTT Gmail function to send the email. That Gmail function on IFTTT can send an email and copy up to 19 other users ... I only needed one. Since I only needed to know about detections of animals and people, I didn't have to pay for IFTTT which allows non-paying users to create two applets for free. You have to create one for each type of detection.

[TomMcBride]

See my post from earlier today. I think an IFTTT.com account can solve you problem.

[Hckyguy1]

Thanks for the IFTTT suggestion.  I tried it, and it works.  Although it doesn’t have the video link that Arlo used to send.   I also canceled the Arlo Secure subscription, so I can’t differentiate between people, animals, etc.  I refuse to support Arlo any longer, but I’ll make do without a subscription or any new cameras.  Arlo SUCKS

[lywaz]

Pretty cool. 

But a big part of me is thinking, I paid this idiot company for a service that they no longer want to provide, and I don't want to have to work that hard (as in not at all) to make it work. For me it's easier to drop them... just glad this all happened before I wasted money on upgrades. 

I have to echo what someone else said... I was an IT person for many years, and among other things ran email servers. If anything it's easier now (better tools). I don't buy any argument that dropping email is saving them money. Maybe they lost the one developer who knew how it worked. :-0

[Tinman4now]

I agree!!! I don't want to come up with a fix for something I didn't create. Arlo has made an email change so what gonna happen when they make another or an update. I've got better things to do than install/setup new applications to correct what they did. I don't know how IFTTT works or the best platform Android vs google vs IOS. I still have issues with push notifications with IOS 17.1.2 and apple will continue to update IOS. An email server is not a big issue so I believe Arlo is just downsizing its processes. I also think Arlo might sell off the self monitoring service the same way Fitbit sold to Google. I don't have an answer or fix, I'm just gonna wait and not upgrade any Arlo products.

[SAStiner77]

StephenB,

Thank you for your reply.  At least now, I can stop wasting my time trying to resolve this issue.  I hope that Arlo will realize that this is an inconvenience for their customers and reverse that decision.  Again, thank you for this information.

[Dinostones]

Let us know how the light bulb camera works out.

I'm sure I'll get an email alert when you do!

[Dinostones]

Yours was a most excellent post.

My set up is similar, though I have multiple locations with multiple hubs.

1) The email alerts were appreciated by Family.

2) The email alerts would trigger a text msg to myself and several contacts. I could then log onto the appropriate account for review. When appropriate, I could notify an associate who would investigate.  Thankfully, most of my visitors are wildlife, but we have had unwanted guests of another type, when not maintenance crews.

I would need several phones with cell service, to carry around, with an instance of Arlo on each, to receive a useful push notification. Not much of an option, for me.

IFTTT is useless to me. I have independent hubs spread out across a geographical range.

#ARLO Bring back the email alerts!