Not getting alert emails

Work through these in order. Most missing alerts stop at one of the first three steps, before any email is sent.

Check the alert level

Alerts only go out for incidents, and only for the severities your alert level allows. Open Alerts › What and look at Alert level. It’s one of “Critical only”, “Warnings and critical” and “Everything”.

On Critical only, a warning sends nothing. Info goes out only on Everything, and a suggestion never sends an alert. See Alert level.

Some issues also take more than one check to open an incident. An uptime check, for example, waits for failures in a row before the page counts as down.

Is the incident muted?

Open the incident. A muted incident sends no reminders and no “Got worse” alerts until the mute ends. A mute lasts for an hour, for 24 hours or until it’s fixed. You still get the alert when it’s resolved.

Reminders only go out if they’re turned on in Alerts › What, every 4 hours while the incident is open, and only to channels the incident’s alert reached. See Mute.

Was the site down?

While a site’s homepage is down, you get the down alert and nothing else about that site. Pages, files and SSL that break at the same time still open incidents, and they show in the app and the summary email, but they don’t send alerts. One of those incidents stays quiet after the site is back, too: no “Got worse” alert, no reminder and no resolved alert.

A site also sends each channel at most 10 alerts about new incidents in an hour. Anything over that is listed in SEOComet but not sent.

The site’s own alerts

A site can have alert settings of its own, in its Settings › Alerts. It can:

• use its own alert level instead of the account’s
• send to only some channels
• be set to Off, which sends nothing to channels for that site (Email me about this site still sends)

Alerts › What lists every site with its own alerts. See Per-site alerts.

Then check the channel itself in Alerts › Where. A channel can be off because someone turned it off, because its deliveries kept failing, or because the plan doesn’t include it. See Alert channels.

Confirm other addresses

An email channel can send to people in the account and to other addresses you list. Each other address gets an email with a link to confirm it. Nothing is sent to it until someone clicks that link.

Open the channel to see each address marked Confirmed or Waiting for confirmation. To send the link again, remove the address, save, then add it back and save again.

People in the account need a verified email address before a channel can email them. In the channel’s settings, someone who hasn’t verified shows “email not verified”.

People who only have some of the account’s sites never get channel emails, because a channel covers every site. They can use Email me about this site instead.

Your own email

Every account starts with a channel called Email me, which sends to the owner’s account email. It only works once that address is verified. If yours isn’t, a banner at the top of the app offers to send the verification email again.

Email me about this site, on a site’s Settings or under Profile, also goes to your account email and also needs it verified. These emails follow your own level, not the site’s, and they work differently from channels:

• they send when an incident opens, gets worse or is resolved, never a reminder
• a repeat of the same kind for the same incident within 60 minutes is skipped
• a muted incident sends you only its resolution
• a site that’s down, or has sent you 10 alerts in the last hour, holds the rest back, as above
• if a channel already emails you the same alert, you get it once, from the channel

See Email me about this site.

Spam and filters

Alert emails come from alerts@seocomet.com. Add it to your contacts or your mail filter’s allow list.

Then look in spam, junk and any promotions or updates tabs. Company mail systems often hold messages from new senders in quarantine, so ask whoever runs yours to check there.

See what was sent

The incident page lists every alert under Alerts sent, with its result. Each channel’s page, opened from Alerts › Where, has the same list for that channel.

• Sent: SEOComet handed it to its mail service. If it still didn’t arrive, look again at spam and filters.
• Waiting or Retrying: a failed attempt is retried, up to 6 attempts in all.
• Failed: every attempt was used, or the failure can’t be fixed by retrying. The reason is shown. “Nobody to email” means nobody on the channel has a verified email and no other address is confirmed.
• Not sent: the channel was off when the alert was due, a reminder’s incident was muted or closed before it went out, the site was down, or the site had already sent 10 alerts that hour. The reason is shown.

Still missing? Email hello@seocomet.com with a link to the incident and the time you expected the alert.