"Integrating" alarm devices via email notification

Other Devices & Integrations General Device Discussions
#1

There’s no sub-forum for integration of alarm systems that I saw, so here goes…

In my last home, I was running UI5 and using AD2USB to integrate my alarm panel. Each loop in the alarm appeared in Vera natively: every door, groups of windows, smoke detectors, etc.; it was great. In my new place, I have a WiFi-based alarm and I don’t expect to have any direct access to devices on the alarm. I can, however, get email notifications each time a device on the alarm is opened.

Has anyone used email notifications as inputs to Vera? And… in what way? I use Prowl as notifications of outputs. I don’t use IFTTT and never found much use for it. I’m curious if there’s some way to accomplish this, possibly with a plugin. I can create a dedicated email and external rules for subject line/body/etc.

Thanks for reading and for any consideration.

#2

Could you give a little more detail on your WiFi alarm. Does it have a name. Can you open it up to your network for discovery via UPnP. The more information you can supply the more chance you have of getting a solution

#3

I have cameras which provide email triggers, but I use openLuup running on a RPi which has a built-in SMTP server and is bridged to my Veras for Zwave control. But this perhaps is not a course you want to follow.

IIRC, the used to be a Gmail-based plugin for Vera (perhaps only for calendars?), but I don’t know if this is still available/works.

#4

It’s an ADT alarm, set up start to finish by the alarm tech. It’s not on my WiFi network, and I doubt I can access the alarm network… and not sure I want to! I was only thinking about using inbound email notifications as event triggers and wondering if anyone had done that.

#5

Something like this could be adapted for your use Luup code to send your own email notifications - General Dev Discussions - Ezlo Community

#6

I believe that’s used to send email notifications from Vera. I accomplish that through Prowl. What I’m looking for is a way for Vera to interpret inbound email notifications as triggers, probably through some plugin or external application.

#7

You could use tasker or automate to intercept emails and send http request to vera

#8

I’m an iPhone user, but more to the point, I’d like to avoid involving my mobile to handle any of the processing if I don’t have to.

#9

I had it in the past, for the very same reason @akbooer mentioned. I now transitioned to my in-house solution monitoring Cams and getting movement notifications with external PIR sensor, but I digress.

I have an Azure Function connecting to a POP3 account and reading e-mails, then writing them to a queue, with a console app running on my Linux box inside the house, to monitor this queue. I use it to execute commands inside my house coming from external triggers/apps, without exposing anything to the outside. You can simplify this and find something using POP3 directly in LUA, of course, but you get the point. The e-mail parsing is the easiest way, since those e-mail are template based and easily processable. Good luck :slight_smile:

EDIT: of course, I have this since I already have the queue in place, but you can code it directly in a console app, locally running into your network.