Email is now a full alert channel. Every alert tier Hail Sentinel serves for a saved address — from the days-out outlook to the take-cover alert — can land in your inbox as well as on your lock screen, produced by the same evaluation, queued in the same dispatch.
Why email
Push is the channel built for the moment: it interrupts, and interruption is exactly what a storm bearing down on your address deserves. It is also the most perishable thing we send. A push notification lives and dies with one device — a battery that gave out mid-afternoon, a ringtone muted for a meeting, a phone left charging in another room.
Email has the opposite temperament. It waits until you fetch it, shows up in every inbox you own, and stays. That second property is the real reason this channel exists: an alert email is a record.
- Searchable. Every alert your address has received, one inbox query away — months later, from any device.
- Forwardable. Hand the storm's paper trail to a roofer or an insurance adjuster exactly as it arrived.
- On the record. Each message carries a reference ID tying it to the exact evaluation that produced it.
One alerting brain
There is no separate email product behind this, and no email tier. One evaluation decides whether your address gets an alert; the same pass decides which channels carry it. Email does not get its own thresholds, its own copy, or its own idea of severity — it inherits the alert, whole. If a storm qualifies for your address, the email says what the push says, about the same place, for the same reason.
The full ladder rides the channel: the days-out outlook, the watch as conditions organize, the escalating alerts as a storm approaches and intensifies, and the take-cover alert itself. One deliberate exception: the informational “hail nearby” notice — hail in the area but not headed at your address — stays push-only. A message that doesn't call for action doesn't earn a place in your inbox.
Inside each email
Every alert email is built from one frame. A severity-colored band opens the message, so the level registers before a word is read. Your saved location's name leads the body — the alert is about a place, and it says which one — followed by the same plain-language message the push carries. A details panel pairs the estimated hail size with the timing; a recommended-actions block matches the severity. The footer states why the message came, links to your alert settings, and closes with the reference ID that ties it to its evaluation.
Two construction details you'd otherwise never notice. Every message travels as both a formatted and a plain-text version, so it reads on anything that can read mail. And the brand mark is embedded inside the message rather than loaded from the web — an alert email renders complete with images blocked, offline, or years after the fact. Nothing in it depends on our servers still being reachable to say what it said.
Turning it on
Email is part of Premium's channel set, alongside text. Setup is one screen:
- Open the app's alert settings. The channel ladder lists push, email, and text together, and the toggles are account-wide — one switch covers every saved address.
- Flip email on. Alerts go to the address on your account — the one you sign in with — shown right on the row.
- Send yourself a test from the same screen. It travels the real delivery path, so you can see the format — and teach your mail client where to file it — before a storm does it for real.
One guard runs underneath all of this: the channel only ever sends to a verified address. Until an address is confirmed as yours, the system treats it as someone else's mailbox and refuses to mail it — it fails closed, quietly, rather than deliver a hazard message to the wrong person.
Kept quiet on purpose
An inbox is borrowed space, and an alerting product that abuses it ends up in the spam folder — a failure mode a hazard channel cannot afford. So the channel is deliberately conservative:
- Opt-in only. Nothing is mailed until you turn the toggle on yourself.
- A hard daily cap per account. A violent day cannot become an inbox flood.
- A working opt-out on every message — the footer link, plus the machine-readable unsubscribe your mail client surfaces itself.
- Quiet hours are honored. Routine, non-hazard mail — digests, seasonal summaries — respects the same quiet windows push does, and anything held back still lands in the app's record.
What this doesn't change
The alert that tells you to take cover is not moving behind anything. Free accounts keep what they have always had: the full-accuracy detection model and the take-cover push, for every saved address. Email is a Premium channel because it is redundancy and record-keeping — a second copy of what push already delivers, on a channel that keeps — not because it is the way you find out. If you never turn it on, nothing about whether Hail Sentinel catches your storm, or tells you about it, changes.
What does change, once the toggle is on: the next alert your address earns exists in two places at once — on your lock screen for the moment, and in your inbox for everything after.