For the last 8 years I’m running my Home Security via alarmnet.com — I love(d) how I could glue my scripts to the email notifications from Alarmnet, resulting in an almost seamless experience. As we all know; home automation isn’t worth a dime unless it works 100% of the time.

The notifications would enter my mail server from where a simple procmail script initiates home automation events. Alarms forward to my phone using Pushover and come with their respective priorities (I love it when someone sends me snailmail and this will get my Pushover nagging repeatedly until I clear the alert).

Since 4 weeks I’m experiencing flaky e-mail delivery and it just kills everything. I don’t want to use the app and I love using the 5800 remote and my commercial grade motion sensors.

Just now I finished a tiny script that pulls the event logs from alarmnet.com because these jokers are unable to get their e-mail notifications working again. And I kid you not, this used to be flawless for the full 8 years. And for the sake of completeness, I bypassed my own SMTP server and started sending everything trough Gmail, just to see if for any reason the issue was with me.

A stark reminder on how dependent we are making ourselves on single companies.

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