Nextcloud, Qbittorrent, Truenas and loads of other svcs take optional email credentials for sending alerts and other features (eg. password recovery for nextcloud).
What email providers do people usually use to make this process simple to set up? For example, Microsoft doesn’t allow basic auth anymore so it’s supposedly not possible to use via most of these setups, and some other services seem like they have a low inbox size (does this matter?)
Because it’s universal, it works, it’s multi-platform, device agnostic and it’s simple to use user side.
Nothing else available really fits that criteria.
The closest in todays age is probally discord or teams, but neither of which are decentralized. XMPP could work for it, but nobody really uses it anymore and to be honest the standard is ugly as hell to implement.
Browser Notifications are ineffective and have a high probability of failing or not being seen, they are more meant for real-time notices not historical notices not to mention locked to that browser.
App notifications would be amazing for things with apps, but not everyone wants to be forced into using their mobile device for everything, and it would again only be available from said app(unless you do use something like NTFY), which would generally be locked down to a device
Email sucks admin side, but there’s a reason its used.
This is also ignoring the multi-use case that email allows for such as authentication as well, so if its already being stored for accounts, might as well use it for notifications
I already listed a handful of other platforms that check all those same things without being a pain in the ass to host, being sucky to use, or requiring approval from your ISP.
Uglier than email? Nah.
Yes, NTFY is another example I already gave.
No it’s not.
It shouldn’t be used for accounts. That was my entire point. I host a dozen services and half of them no one else can use because the software mandates email verification, which I can’t use because my ISP doesn’t think I should be allowed to for some reason.