I have never used NodeRed before and I wanted to ask this question here before embarking on a journey of how to use NodeRed only to find out it is not capable…
First a bit of background. I have an alarm system which does not have an API or any push notifications other than unofficial hacks. It does send notification emails when certain events take place. Since my phone, like most others, only provides a brief notification when an email is received wanted to find a solution where I can receive an WhatApp call as this is instantly more noticeable and hardly easy to miss. It could also alert other users too.
So, my question is this – can NodeRed monitor an email account for messages from a particular address and extract the data from within its structured format and then make a voip call to WhatsApp and autoplay some audio?
I’m guessing you’d expect the email to have push notifications for a timely response and then regex to extract the data. Text to voice for the WhatsApp message, maybe?
As long as the data is consistent and reasonably structured.
Not entirely sure as WhatsApp isn't terribly accessible.
However, if you are happy to use Telegram, that is likely to be a lot easier.
Indeed, and even then, there are no delivery time guarantees on email. It isn't uncommon for emails to take minutes to be delivered.
I seem to remember that there are nodes for this.
For reliability, you may wish to consider an alternative approach. Assuming that your alarm has an internal sounder, you could set up a simple sound detector and use that to trigger a flow rather than trying to wait for an email to be delivered.
I'm not adverse to Telegram (in fact I hadn't even given it consideration) but thought WhatsApp was used more and hence more likely to have some integration in NodeRed. If telegram is easier to implement then so be it...
The data is a well structured format and I believe regex would do well here.
Email has been "ok" mostly and I do acknowledge there is a indeterminate lag and not guaranteed but I can live with that.
SMS Messages are also sent out but I'm not sure how NodeRed would do with these and there can be delays here too so I don't believe this would be any more reliable.
There is an internal sounder but I was hoping to have NodeRed in a remote location hence a sounder would not work in this instance and the added bonus the email would be deliverable anywhere.
Assuming your email provider has at least IMAP?
if your phone is also connected to this mailbox, and its based on POP3 it may cause Node RED to not receive the email.
But since we are no longer in the 90s I would expect your service provider to have IMAP .
Another potential is IFTTT. It has an email sink, and you can get IFTTT to trigger flows.
this may remove the need for polling the mailbox also - Im not sure of the abilities with the email sink, but if you need specifics from the email, it may not do what you need.
Providing you use IMAP, your setup should work, as @TotallyInformation suggests, hooking it up with Telegram.
Here is the email node (the only one I know of, Im sure there is an array of them)
There are SMS nodes for Node-RED via services such as Twilio - not used them myself as I'm happy with the free Telegram API (and these days I sometimes find data more reliable than SMS!).
But it also depends on the country and mobile provider, you may well find other options for SMS too.
The free version of IFTTT is sometimes only responsive to the nearest 15 minutes. Paid version may give you more responsiveness.
I also recommend SIGNL4 - you can get sms texts, push notifications or voice calls. It is also possible to configure it according to your needs - like getting a push notification instantly and if you don't answer you'll get a phone call after 5min.
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