Notifications
Exolvra sends email for approvals, budget alerts, daily digests, and agent escalations. This page is where you wire up an email provider, set the default sender, and control what urgency counts as send-worthy.
What this page is for
By default, Exolvra has no notification channel — alerts live inside the dashboard, and if you’re not looking, you miss them. This page adds email as an outbound channel. Once configured, approvals, budget warnings, and the daily digest can land in your inbox.
Two cards on the page: Email Delivery and Daily Digest.
Email delivery
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Master switch. Off by default. |
| Provider | auto (pick the first configured), resend, mailgun, smtp, mailtrap |
| Default From | Exolvra <no-reply@yourdomain.com> format — used for every outbound email |
| Minimum Urgency | Filter: low, medium (default), high, critical. Emails below this urgency are dropped |
The four providers
| Provider | Best for | Key field |
|---|---|---|
| Resend | Modern transactional email, easy DX | re_... API key |
| Mailgun | Established, high-volume | API key + domain |
| SMTP | Any server that speaks SMTP, self-hosted or corporate | Host, port, username, password |
| Mailtrap | Development / testing sandbox | SMTP credentials from your Mailtrap inbox |
Configure the provider you plan to use. Paste its credentials. Leave the others blank.
Mailtrap is special — use it during development to catch emails in an inbox rather than actually sending. Swap to Resend or Mailgun for production. Keeping Mailtrap credentials in production is a common way to accidentally black-hole legitimate notifications.
Minimum urgency
Every notification is tagged with an urgency level:
- low — informational, weekly summaries, non-urgent confirmations
- medium — routine approvals, daily digest (default threshold)
- high — budget crossing soft threshold, agent escalations, rate-limit 429s from providers
- critical — budget hard limit hit, signing key missing, instance unreachable
Setting the threshold to medium sends you everything from medium up. high skips the daily digest and routine approvals. critical is silence unless something is on fire.
Testing your configuration
The bottom of the card has a Test Email input. Paste your address, click Send Test Email, check your inbox. If the test email arrives, the provider is wired correctly. If it doesn’t, the page shows the provider’s error message.
Common failures:
- API key wrong — provider returns auth error immediately
- Default From domain not verified — provider rejects the message at SMTP time
- Spam filter — check spam folder before assuming something is broken
- Network blocks outbound SMTP — some hosting networks block port 25/587; use API-based providers (Resend/Mailgun) or a relay
Daily digest
The daily digest is a once-per-day email summarizing activity across the instance: issues opened/closed, approvals handled, cost totals, notable events. It’s the newspaper, not the fire alarm.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Off by default |
| Send Hour (UTC) | 0–23, the hour the digest generates and sends |
| Recipients | One email per line; all configured recipients get the same digest |
| Dashboard URL | The public URL of your instance — used for deep links inside the digest (https://exolvra.yourdomain.com) |
Set the send hour to something quiet in your team’s schedule — 8 UTC is a reasonable default for US-based teams (4am ET / 1am PT, ready in your inbox before the workday).
The digest respects the minimum urgency filter. If you’ve set the threshold to high, the digest still sends — but entries in it are filtered to high-urgency events only.
Common pitfalls
Forgetting to verify the From domain. Resend, Mailgun, and most SMTP relays require domain verification before they’ll send. Emails fail silently from their side until verification is complete.
Too many recipients on the digest. The digest goes to every address on the list, every day. Five people is fine; fifty is an unread-email factory. Use a group alias for large teams.
Setting minimum urgency to low. You’ll get every notification, including the tiny informational ones. medium is the right default; only drop it if you’re actively debugging missing notifications.
Production running on Mailtrap. Always check before going live.
Where to go next
- Approvals — the notification source most admins care most about
- Audit log — mirror notifications as searchable events
- Admin overview — the broader operator surface