Home Assistant with Virgin Media SMTP Server

 As it took a while for me to get the settings correct to enable me to send email alerts using Virgin Media in the UK, I thought I would document the process.

Add a new user to Virgin Media

First off add a new user to Virgin Media instead of using the main login for the account, this will make it to keep track of things and also interms of security, you don’t reeally want your Virgin account password stored in plain text on a device connected to the internet.

  • Login to your account here:
    https://my.virginmedia.com/home/index
  • Then go to My profile and choose Manage Accounts.
Virgin Media account settings
  • Then click Create a new account.
  • Choose a suitable First and Last name – I went for Home Assistant.
  • Then pick an email address for the mailbox, I started mine with ha so I could easily know what it was. It must be at least 6 characters with no spaces or underscores. You can use . full stops though.
  • Once that is confirmed, you will be promoted to set a password.
    Unfortunately Virgin Media wont accept a password longer than 10 characters for some reason, c’mon Virgin make it longer!
  • Now you are all ready, just head over to https://my.virginmedia.com/my-apps/email/mailbox to test you can login first though.

Email Notifications in Home Assistant

Go to you Home Assistant, then Supervisor > File Editor > Open Web UI

You want to open your configuration.yaml file

In here create a new section called notify and add the following sections:

  • name: a descriptive name for this notifier
  • platform: smtp
  • sender: the full email address of the virgin media account you just set up
  • recipient: the email address of who you want to receive the emails
  • server: smtp.virginmedia.com
  • username: the Virgin Media email you just setup above
  • password: the password you set when creating the account
  • port: 465
  • encryption: tls
  • timeout: 15

It should look like this

Example configuration.yaml file

Now save and we are ready to test it.

Testing email Notifications in Home Assistant

Now we are all setup we now want to do a quick test and the easiest way to do this it to got to Developer Tools and then Services.

In the Service drop down scroll down to notify.xxxx and find the name you gave it above.

Then in the Service Data box enter something like:

{
“title”: “Test Email”,
“message”: “Hello this is a test”
}

Then click Call Service

Example email notify service data

You will get no feedback from the web form but you should get an email in the account of the recipient you setup, this shows that email notifications are now working.

Email Notifications in Home Assistant Automations

You are now ready to include the email notifications in your Home Assistant Actions, below is one that I use to notify me that my Floodlight has been triggered.

Example Home Assistant email notify action

For more information on Home Assistant SMTP Notifications visit:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/smtp/

For Virgin Media email settings visit:
https://www.virginmedia.com/help/updating-virgin-media-mail-settings-on-android

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing Zigbee2MQTT on Home Assistant for Beginners

Image
  I’ve put this together to help me remember the steps and also hopefully to help out other people struggling to setup this with Home Assistant as a complete beginner. Zigbee2MQTT Hardware First step is that you will need some form of hardware dongle to act as the Zigbee sniffer, this is instead of a SmartThings or Philips hue hub. I bought one off eBay for about £15 (in 2021). This is the one I bought: Plug it into your Home Assistant and then your are ready. Install Zibbee2MQTT Software For this to work we need two pieces of software we need the Zigbee2MQTT driver software and then we need the MQTT software. First, the Zigbee2MQtt software, in Home Assistant: Go to Supervisor > Add-on Store Here we need to add a Repository by clicking on the 3 dot in the top corner. In here paste in the following repository: https://github.com/zigbee2mqtt/hassio-zigbee2mqtt Beware you might see instructions for a reposiriioery from https://github.com/Koenkk this has now been depreciated and yo...
Read more

Setup Shelly Relay with Home Assistant using MQTT

Image
  As I keep forgetting the steps I thouht I would write a quick guide on how to setup a Shelly relay with Home Assistant, in this specific case I am using a Shelly 1PM. This guide is going to assume that you have already wired up your Shelly relay and you have Home Assistant up and running, Connect Shelly to your local WiFi Firstly connect directly to the new Shelly relay by WiFi, if you scan your WiFi you should see something like Shelly1-xxxxxxx or Shelly1pm-xxxxxxx depending on which version. Now open the Shelly App on your phone and choose Add Device, making sure the WiFi connection specified in the app is the one you want to connect the device to. You should now see the new Shelly device discovered in the app if you go to discovered devices, check that you can turn it on/off in the app as expected. Set the Shelly Relay with the MQTT Server Settings For my setup I am using the MQTT platform because I couldn’t get the direct Home Assistant Shelly setup to work. I have the mosqui...
Read more