---
title: Making sure alert emails reach you
description: How to stop outage alerts landing in spam, and why email alone isn't enough.
category: alerts
updated: 2026-10-12
tags: [alerts, email, deliverability, spam, allowlist]
---

An alert that lands in your spam folder is the same as no alert at all. This page
covers what to do about it — and why we'd rather you didn't rely on email on its
own.

## Add our alert address to your safe senders

Alerts come from:

```text
monitor@alerts.uptimetwin.com
```

Add that **exact address** to your safe senders or allowed senders list — not the
domain. Some mail systems, Microsoft 365 in particular, treat an address entry as
stronger than a domain entry, and there are cases where a domain entry is quietly
ignored.

Outage alerts are the only thing sent from that address. Account email — password
resets, receipts — comes from a different one, so allowing alerts through doesn't
mean allowing everything else, and a filter rule on your marketing mail can't
accidentally catch an outage notice.

How you do this depends on your mail provider:

- **Gmail** — open an alert, click the three dots, then *Filter messages like
  these*, and choose *Never send it to Spam*.
- **Outlook / Microsoft 365** — *Settings → Mail → Junk email → Safe senders*, then
  add the address.
- **Apple Mail / iCloud** — move an alert out of Junk and add the sender to your
  contacts.

## If you use a work email address, this probably isn't enough

Most company mail runs through a security gateway — Microsoft Defender, Proofpoint,
Mimecast, Barracuda — that sits in front of your mailbox. Those gateways make their
decision **before** your personal safe-senders list is ever consulted, so adding the
address yourself may not change anything.

If your alerts are going missing on a work address, send your IT team our
[email deliverability reference for IT teams](/docs/advanced/email-it-reference).
It has the sending domains and technical details they'll ask for.

## How we send alerts

Alert email goes out through **Postmark**, with **SMTP2GO** as an automatic
fallback if Postmark is unavailable. Both are established commercial senders whose
business is deliverability — they manage sending reputation, complaint handling and
suppression lists so that our alerts arrive.

Two things follow from that, and both are in your favour:

- **A provider outage doesn't stop your alerts.** If one can't take the message, the
  other does, automatically.
- **Alerts are sent separately from everything else.** Outage mail, account mail and
  product news each travel on their own stream, so a problem affecting one — a
  reputation issue, a spam complaint on a newsletter — can't drag down your outage
  alerts.

The address you see never changes when we fail over, so a safe-sender rule you set
today keeps working.

## Please don't rely on email on its own

Email is the convenient channel, not the most reliable one. Every layer between us
and your inbox — your provider, your gateway, your spam filter — is a place an alert
can be delayed or dropped, and none of them are under our control.

That's true no matter how good the sending side is. We can control how the message
leaves us; we can't control what your gateway decides to do with it.

A Microsoft Teams, Google Chat or webhook channel delivers more reliably than email
does — there is no spam filter in the path. A webhook is also how you reach Slack,
Discord, Telegram or anything else that accepts one. All three need the Pro, Business or MSP plan. If
something matters enough that you'd want to be woken up for it, add at least one of
them alongside your email alerts. See
[notification channels](/docs/alerts/notification-channels) for how to set those up.

## If alerts stop arriving

1. **Check your spam or quarantine folder first.** If an alert is sitting there,
   mark it as not spam — that teaches your provider as well as fixing this one.
2. **Check the alert actually fired.** Open the monitor and look at its history. If
   there's no incident recorded, the problem is the monitor's settings, not email.
3. **Check your notification channel is still enabled** on the monitor.
4. **Ask your IT team whether it was quarantined at the gateway.** They can see
   this; you usually can't.

If you've been through all four and alerts still aren't arriving, get in touch —
include the time an alert should have arrived and we can tell you what happened to
it on our side.

## Related

- [Notification channels](/docs/alerts/notification-channels)
- [How alerts work](/docs/alerts/how-alerts-work)
- [Email deliverability reference for IT teams](/docs/advanced/email-it-reference)