I sometimes receive a question from a potential customer, asking whether Simon has the ability to send a notification via email.

Although I do mention it in a number of places, this isn’t an unreasonable question, particularly if you just download Simon and start playing with it, as no email options appear in the list of available notifiers in the Edit Test pane by default.

Why is this? Because unlike the Speech and Sound kinds of notifiers, the Email one requires some configuration before it can be used, so it can’t be offered by default.

The way notifiers work is (I hope) pretty intuitive, but a little indirect. Simon provides a number of notifier kinds that do the work of notifications, and you configure notifiers to use those, then choose notifiers for each test.

These levels of abstraction allow easy re-use of notifiers: a single kind of notifier can be used by multiple notifiers, and a single notifier can be used by multiple tests, without having to set up the same things over and over again.

For example, you can add a notifier to email yourself for some failures, another email notifier to your clients for other failures, another one for recoveries, and so on, and use whichever ones of those are desired in tens or hundreds of tests, as required, as simply as choosing them from a pop-up menu.

So, as I said, there is no email notifier set up by default, since it needs configuration, but you can easily add one. If you’re editing a test and realize that you want to receive an email when this test changes, fails, and/or recovers, you can click the New Notifier… button in the Notifiers section of the Edit Test pane, which will switch to the Notifiers page, and start editing a new notifier. You can then choose Email from the Notifier Kind pop-up menu, and the controls below will change to those for an email, with a sample email pre-populated, which you can edit as desired:

You can then configure the email To etc fields, plus switch to the Name page to give the notifier a name, and perhaps the Options page to indicate whether this notifier is available for changes, failures and/or recoveries.

Once it all looks good, click Done to save the notifier. You can check that it is set up correctly by choosing the File ▸ Notify Now menu command; that will send an email with placeholder values. If you don’t receive the email, check the notifier settings.

The new notifier will then be available for that test and any others you want to use it in:

Easy!