Set up NightOwl with free Brevo SMTP

What you'll have at the end

A configured email alert channel in NightOwl that sends through Brevo with a 300/day free quota and 5-20 second delivery on quiet sends. New issues, resolved issues, missed scheduled tasks, and queue failures land in your inbox.

Why Brevo's free tier works for NightOwl

Three properties make Brevo a strong free-tier choice — especially in Europe:

• 300 emails/day forever — biggest free transactional quota among real providers (SendGrid is 100/day, Resend is 100/day inside the 3,000/month).
• No domain required to start — validate a single sender email and you're sending. Useful when you don't control DNS yet.
• EU-based infrastructure — for GDPR-conscious teams or recipients in Europe, Brevo's IPs and data residency are a meaningful plus.

Two catches worth knowing up front:

• Free-tier shared IP pool affects deliverability. Sends to Outlook/Hotmail and Yahoo can occasionally land in spam, especially before your sender warms up. Free-tier delivery also has no priority queue — during Brevo's own peak hours, sends can lag 30-60 seconds. This is Brevo's free tier, not NightOwl — verify in Brevo's Statistics → Logs view, which shows every send with timestamps. Both clear up on the Starter tier.
• 300/day rolling cap. The reset is per-rolling-24h, not midnight. In practice, NightOwl's fingerprint-based grouping keeps alert volume well clear during normal incidents — but sustained overrun trips the limit and Brevo rate-limits your SMTP transactions.

Step 1 — Sign up for Brevo free

Head to brevo.com and create an account. No credit card. Brevo's onboarding asks a few business profile questions — answer honestly; they tune anti-abuse heuristics on the responses.

Step 2 — Validate a sender email

In the Brevo dashboard, go to Senders & IPs → Senders → Add a sender. Enter the email address you want NightOwl alerts to come from (e.g. alerts@yourdomain.com or even a personal Gmail). Brevo sends a validation email — click the link.

Optional but recommended: also authenticate the full domain under Senders & IPs → Domains. SPF + DKIM verification unlocks better deliverability and removes Brevo's "via brevomail.com" subtitle in some clients. 5 minutes plus DNS propagation.

Step 3 — Generate an SMTP key

Go to SMTP & API → SMTP. You'll see two values: your login email (your Brevo account email — used as the SMTP username) and an SMTP key field with a "Generate a new SMTP key" button.

Click generate, name the key "NightOwl", copy the value. Brevo shows it once — store it somewhere safe.

Step 4 — Open the NightOwl email channel form

Sign in to the NightOwl dashboard. Pick your application, then go to Settings → Issues. Scroll to the Email section and click Configure SMTP (or Add another if you already have an email channel).

Step 5 — Fill in Brevo's SMTP settings

Plug these values into the NightOwl email channel form:

The Username is your Brevo account email (the one you signed up with). The Password is the SMTP key from Step 3 — not your account password.

The From Address must match a validated sender. If it doesn't, Brevo accepts the SMTP transaction but silently drops the message — verify in Brevo's Logs view.

Step 6 — Test, then subscribe to alert events

Save the channel and click Send Test. NightOwl fires a synthetic alert through Brevo. Quiet sends arrive in 5-20 seconds. Cross-check Brevo's Statistics → Logs — every send shows there with delivery timestamps and recipient response codes.

Then tick which of the four issue-lifecycle events fire emails:

• issue.new — a new exception fingerprint appears (always on)
• issue.reopened — a previously-resolved issue fires again (recommended on)
• issue.resolved — issue triaged closed (optional)
• issue.ignored — issue muted (optional)

For solo triage, leave all four on. For team triage, just issue.new + issue.reopened avoids duplicate notifications when colleagues resolve issues. Volume comfortably stays under Brevo's 300/day cap during normal incidents — alerts only fire on lifecycle changes, not per exception occurrence.

When to upgrade to Brevo Starter

Three signals it's time to leave the free tier:

• Deliverability to enterprise mailboxes is flaky — Starter tiers gradually move you to better-reputation IP pools.
• You're approaching 300/day — Starter at $9/mo lifts to 5,000/month with no daily cap.
• Compliance asks for sender records you can audit — paid tiers retain logs for 30+ days; free tier is short.

Brevo vs Resend vs Gmail vs SendGrid

All four work as NightOwl alert channels. Quick decision matrix:

• Brevo — biggest free quota (300/day), no domain required to start, EU-based. Best when you don't yet control DNS or you're EU-resident.
• Resend — fastest, branded sender after DNS verify. Best if you control a domain and care about alert latency.
• Gmail SMTP — zero-config, no provider account at all. Slower (queue lag during bursts).
• SendGrid — industry-standard brand, smaller free tier (100/day).