Where alerts reach you

How RoamVitals reaches you outside the app, how to set quiet hours and your timezone, and how to stop messages you do not want.

In the app: /settings

Where alerts reach you#

Every alert always appears inside RoamVitals. That is free, on every plan, and never limited. This page is about the messages that leave the app and find you when you are not looking at it.

What can reach you today#

In the app. Always on. When you build or edit an alert, the switch under Where should it go? labelled In the app is on and cannot be turned off.

Email. Goes to the address on your account, and only to that address. You can see it on Settings in the Account card, in the Email box. That box is greyed out, so email always arrives at the address you registered with.

Webhook. This one belongs to a single alert rather than to you. Under Where should it go? there is a Webhook switch and, once it is on, a Webhook address box, so that alert posts to a URL you choose. It is for feeding another system, not for reaching a person, and you cannot move past that step of the wizard with the switch on and the address empty.

Because a webhook is read by software rather than by a person, the two settings on this page that shape what a person reads do not touch it: Email me about does not filter it, and Quiet hours never holds it back.

The Webhook switch is only drawn when your Interface mode is Full control (everything). That is the setting you start with. If you cannot see it, open Settings, find the Appearance card, and change Interface mode from Keep it simple (essentials only) back to Full control (everything).

Text messages and phone calls are not available. RoamVitals can send them, but no plan sells them, so there is nothing for you to set up. You will not find a place to enter a phone number, and the Delivery destinations section described further down does not appear on your Settings page.

Set up email#

1. Open Settings.
2. Find the Notifications card.
3. Turn Email me on. With it off you get no alert emails at all, including carbon monoxide, propane and smoke alerts.
4. Under Email me about, choose one of Everything, Warnings and alarms or Alarms only.
5. Fill in Your timezone, or press Use this device's timezone to fill it in for you.
6. Press Save Preferences.

Your timezone wants an IANA zone name, the kind with a slash in it, such as America/Denver or Europe/London. Anything else is refused when you save, and the card says Failed to save preferences without telling you which field was the problem. Use this device's timezone always fills in a name that works.

Email me about applies to every alert you are subscribed to. An individual alert can be made quieter than this setting, never louder. It has no effect on a webhook.

Quiet hours#

Quiet hours hold real messages back, not just what you see on screen.

1. On the Notifications card, turn Quiet hours on.
2. Set From and Until.
3. Press Save Preferences.

During the window, anything below alarm level is held until the window ends, and released within a minute or so of it. If two or more messages were held, they arrive together as one email with the subject [RVMonitor] While you slept: 2 warnings; if only one was held, it arrives on its own. Everything still appears in the app the moment it happens.

Alarms and safety alerts always break through, so they are never part of that bundle. Safety alerts are the ones RoamVitals classes as life-safety: carbon monoxide, propane, smoke, a gas leak, and a hardwired alarm panel.

Two things worth knowing:

• Quiet hours run on the clock in Your timezone. The helper text under that box says "Leave it empty to follow the RV", but an empty box does not do that: the window is worked out in UTC, which is almost certainly not the clock you meant. Fill it in.
• Setting From and Until to the same time does nothing at all. It is not a permanent mute, it simply turns quiet hours off.

A worked example#

You keep the RV in Colorado and you do not want your phone lighting up overnight for a fridge that drifted a degree.

On Settings, in the Notifications card:

• Email me: on
• Email me about: Warnings and alarms
• Quiet hours: on
• From: 22:00
• Until: 07:00
• Your timezone: America/Denver

Then press Save Preferences.

What happens next:

• A fridge temperature warning at 23:10 Denver time is held. It reaches you within a minute or so of 07:00. If it was the only thing held overnight it arrives as its own email; if other warnings were held too, they arrive together as one While you slept email. It was visible in the app at 23:10 the whole time.
• A carbon monoxide alarm at 02:15 is emailed straight away. Safety alerts ignore quiet hours.
• An information-level notice at 14:00 is not emailed at all, because you chose Warnings and alarms. It still appears in the app.

Delivery destinations, and confirming a phone with a code#

Settings has a Delivery destinations section. It is not on your page today, and that is not about which plan you are on: the section appears when RoamVitals starts selling a way of reaching you that it does not already hold an address for. Email is not one of those, because your account already carries the address, and a webhook carries its URL on the alert. Nothing sold today qualifies, so nobody sees the section. If that changes it appears on its own, with no update to install.

The one other time you may see the heading is when the page cannot reach the server. It then shows a warning beginning "We couldn't load your delivery destinations just now", which goes on to say that anything you have already saved is unaffected and still receiving alerts. Refresh to try again.

If the section ever does appear, these are the rules it works by. They are fixed, whichever kind of destination arrives first.

• Adding one is a box and an Add button. The box is labelled for the kind of address it wants: for a phone number it is Mobile number, and it wants the country code, for example +1 555 010 4477.
• Nothing real is sent to a destination until it is confirmed. Each saved row carries a chip. Verified means it is live. Not verified yet means nothing is sent there, and an unverified destination is refused every time, not queued up.
• Most kinds are confirmed by a test message: press Send a test message, and the message arriving is the proof.
• A phone number is confirmed only by a code sent to that handset. Press Send me a code, type the six digits into the 6-digit code box and press Confirm. While a code is outstanding the chip reads Waiting for the code and the button reads Send a new code. Confirm stays greyed out until all six digits are in, because a wrong code counts against your guesses. There is deliberately no way to confirm a phone with a test message, so that RoamVitals never calls a number whose owner did not hand it over.
• A phone also asks you to tick an agreement before it will save. Nothing is pre-ticked, Add stays greyed out until you tick it, and the sentence you are agreeing to names the way out.

Details that decide what to do when something goes wrong:

• A code lasts 10 minutes. After that, send a new one.
• Five wrong codes and that code is dead. Send a new one and start again.
• There is a small daily limit on codes, and a separate one on how many destinations you can add in a day, so do not press the button repeatedly while you look for the phone.

Turning things off#

There are three different off switches and they do different jobs.

Stop one alert reaching you. Open Alerts, choose the What reaches me tab, find the alert and press Stop telling me. That stops every kind of message for that alert, not only email, and the chip on the row changes to Off. The alert itself keeps running and still appears in the app. To start again, press Tell me about this. If you only want it quieter, leave it on and use the Tell me about dropdown beside it instead, which is greyed out once you have stopped it.

Stop one alert from the email itself. Alert emails end with a Manage subscription link. It opens a page with three buttons - Stop emailing me about this alert, Pause it for now and Keep sending these - and no sign-in is needed. Your mail app's own unsubscribe button does the same thing as the first one. The link is good for 90 days from the day that email was sent; an older one says it has expired. If an email does not show the link at all, use the What reaches me tab instead.

You can unsubscribe from a safety alert this way. The page warns you in red before you press, because after that nobody emails you when it fires.

Stop everything by email. Turn Email me off on the Notifications card. That is total. Safety alerts stop too.

A phone that replied STOP. If a phone ever receives RoamVitals texts, replying STOP from that handset stops everything sent to that number - texts and calls both, carbon monoxide, propane and smoke included. That is the one limit RoamVitals does not override for a safety alert, because the message has already been blocked at the carrier and sending anyway would be unlawful. The Delivery destinations row then reads Replied STOP - receives nothing, and there is no button to argue with it.

To undo it, the owner of that phone replies START from the phone itself. Deleting the saved destination does not undo it, and adding the number again is refused with a message telling you to ask its owner to reply START.

What to do if#

No emails are arriving. Check, in this order: Email me is on in Settings; Email me about is not set higher than the alerts you are waiting for; Quiet hours is not holding them; and on the alert itself, that the Email switch under Where should it go? is on. Then check the What reaches me tab in case that alert says Off or Paused.

Emails arrive at the wrong time of day. Fill in Your timezone on the Notifications card and press Save Preferences. Quiet hours and your daily email count both follow that clock.

Emails arrive in a bundle in the morning. That is quiet hours working. Alarms and safety alerts break through, so they are never in that bundle.

You want alerts to reach a second person. Share the hub with them rather than trying to add their address here. Open Hubs, press the share icon on that hub, type their address into Email to invite and press Invite. They get read-only access, and you can choose whether they see all devices or just some. Sharing is not the same as signing them up: safety alerts add them automatically, but every other alert is theirs to switch on for themselves, from their own What reaches me tab. There is no button anywhere that subscribes somebody else - the wizard's Who gets told section only offers Copy a note you can send them. How many other people can hold subscriptions on one RV depends on the owner's plan. Alert email always goes to the address on each person's own account, and there is no way to point your account's email somewhere else.

You want texts or calls. They are not sold on any plan yet. Nothing you can do in Settings will turn them on.