Email alerts

This is a separate feature from recording, answering a different question. Recording is built to never miss anything, however brief — a false positive costs a deleted clip, a false negative can't be recreated. An inbox has the opposite problem: a walk-by every few minutes makes an alert worthless through sheer volume.

So an email only goes out once motion has held continuously for the duration you set in Settings › Alerts, independent of whatever triggers recording. Turning recording to sound-only doesn't turn off motion emails; they're answering "is someone lingering," not "did anything happen."

A brief gap resets the count. That's deliberate — the motion detector already smooths single-frame flicker on its own, so a real gap here reflects a real gap in activity, not something this feature should paper over.

The cooldown is a second, separate timer: the minimum gap between emails, so someone standing near the sustained-motion threshold doesn't get one every time they cross it. It only starts counting after an email actually sends.

The mail server needs its own account, configured in Settings › Alerts: server address, port 465 (encrypted from the first byte — the option most providers call "SSL," not "STARTTLS"), a username, and a password. Most providers, Gmail included, require an app-specific password here rather than the one you sign in with — OdinCam never sees or stores your real password, and the app-specific one is stored in the Keychain, never in the settings file. "Send test email" proves the configuration works without waiting for real motion.

What the email shows. Each alert is a short, designed email, with the most important thing first:

1. The headline: which camera, and for how long ("Motion on Back Door for 2 minutes").
2. Labels for what was seen: a person, a dog, a cat, or your pet by name ("Rex").
3. The picture of the moment, if you turned on "Include a picture from the camera".
4. When the motion started and when the email was sent.
5. A privacy note saying what the email contains, and how to turn emails off.

Every email also has a plain-text version for mail apps that don't show designs. Nothing in it is loaded from the internet, so opening it tells nobody anything.

What your email provider can see. Email isn't end-to-end encrypted, so your email provider can read each alert like any other email. That's why alert emails have no picture unless you ask for one. Video and live view never go by email; they stay end-to-end encrypted in OdinCam.

To get a picture in each email (your email provider will be able to see it):

1. On your Mac, open OdinCam › Settings › Alerts.
2. Turn on "Include a picture from the camera".

To keep pictures out of email again, turn the same switch off. If you set up email alerts before this switch was off by default, it keeps the setting you had.

To stop the emails, turn off "Email me when motion is sustained" in the same place.

Watching what happened next. Open OdinCam on your iPhone or iPad for live view and recordings. The email doesn't have a button for this yet.