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kylem's profile

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021 10:21 PM

Personal SMTP Relay, Email 2FA, and Camera notifications

To preface all my suggestions, I'll start off by saying we're a small business...

Some of the things I noticed that could be implemented or added are the following:

1. The ability for the customer to use their own SMTP relay. Currently some email notifications take upwards to 15 minutes to send which is absurd to be honest. Why not allow a more tech savvy user the ability to use their own SMTP relay for quicker and more reliable email notifications? Especially for customers such as ourselves on the self monitor plan.

2. As a small business, having the 2FA codes sent via text to our boss's cell phone is not ideal. I noticed others asked for 2FA via email and you gave the generic let us ask our security team. Multiple companies utilize 2FA via email so its kind of silly for you to say lets ask our security team when its a viable, known solution that eliminates SMS only. Please consider expanding the 2FA options ASAP.

3. Cameras should have the ability to send motion detection via email and SMS. The fact that push notifications are the only option is silly; you allow all other sensors the ability to send SMS and emails so why limit cameras? And couple this with the fact we cant customize the push notifications to only send when the system is in "alarm" state is annoying. In a small business setting, the self monitoring plan with the ability to send emails regarding camera motion when the alarm is on would be simply awesome (or even allow us to do Time of Day settings for "off limit areas" where the camera could report the motion in that area.)

Lastly, I'm curious if there is an API that would allow some of my programmers to link the live camera feeds into our intranet?

Community Admin

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5.5K Messages

3 years ago

Hi kylem_2,

Thanks for all these suggestions. I'll relay them to our dev team. I do have some insight as to why some features are set up the way they are:

A big part of what we do revolves around a closed system, so we can control as much of it as possible and keep it all locked down. So we also take a lot of caution with opening up for third parties to take over even some functions.

For Multi-Factor Authentication, our security team specifically decided against email as an option, though other options are being considered. One thing you might not know is that you're actually able to set multiple phone numbers for MFA by SMS. From your boss's phone, you can navigate in the app to Menu > Manage Account > Multi-Factor Authentication, and add more contacts.
When logging in, you'll be able to choose which phone number should get the confirmation code.

Finally, in terms of which channel your notifications go to; it doesn't look like it from the user end, but camera notifications actually go through a totally different system than the core alarm (i.e. alerts from the Base Station). So that's why, at least for now, Camera notifications are only available through the SimpliSafe app via Push Notification.

Our dev team is of course always constantly working on improvements to the system, and user feedback like this really helps.

- Davey D.
Community Development Manager
SimpliSafe Home Security

4 Messages

3 years ago

is there a way for you guys to ensure a more speedy delivery of emails then if you wont open up the consideration for a third party smtp relay? Most notifications I noticed are sent within 1-5 minutes, but the 15 minute delayed email when I was testing had me a little worried about consistency.

I'll look into adding multiple phones for the 2FA bypass for now so thanks for that insight.

702 Messages

is there a way for you guys to ensure a more speedy delivery of emails then


For what it's worth, I have SMS, email and push enabled for my alerts and they're all slower than I'd like. I'm not saying this to mean we should put up with this but rather to say I don't think it's just email. I also think it's gotten worse in the last month or so specifically and this includes bigger delays in stuff showing up on my timeline as well. I suspect there are bigger issues at SimpliSafe at the moment.
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