healthchecks/templates/docs/email.md

# Email

As an alternative to HTTP/HTTPS requests, you can "ping" checks by
sending email messages to special email addresses.

![Email address for pinging via email](IMG_URL/emails.png)

By default, SITE_NAME will consider any email received at the displayed address as
a "success" signal. You can also configure SITE_NAME to look for specific
keywords in message's subject line to decide if the message is "success"
or a "failure" signal. You can set up the keywords in the
**Filtering Rules** dialog:

![Setting filtering rules](IMG_URL/filtering_rules.png)

## Use Case: Newsletter Delivery Monitoring

Consider a cron job that runs weekly and sends weekly newsletters
to a list of email addresses. You have already set up a check to get alerted
when your cron job fails to run. But what you ultimately want to check is if
**your emails are getting sent and delivered**.

The solution: set up another check, and add its email address to your list of
recipient email addresses. Set its Period to 1 week. As long as your weekly email
script runs correctly, and there are no email delivery issues,
SITE_NAME will regularly receive an email, and the check will stay up.