You've Got Mail.

 Quite a simple one to write up this time.

Our front door is solid, and does not have a letter box. I'm rather loathe to put one in, even though previous owners have butchered the front door a bit,  as it is the original front door. The answer has been to install an outside letter box that, hopefully, is going to stand the test of a few Cornish winters. The problem, then, though is how do we know when we have mail? For those of you in North America, we don't have the little flag thing you have.

Enter the Eve Door & Window Sensor. I've used this device in many places for many things, but this is a new one for me.

I bought a Songmics Wall mounted letter box, and then added the Eve door & window as shown above. Initially I tried mounting the main unit on the inside of the letter box, but I couldn't quite make the magnet work with it like that. So rethinking, I changed the orientation, and installed it with the battery unit on the lid. This will also make it easier to change batteries. Inside apple Home, I set it up as a contact sensor.

Great, so now I have a notification that the letter box is opened/closed. But that's not much use amongst all the notifications I get.

This requires some automation. I decided that I needed to play a sound and what better than the old AOL "You've got mail!". I found a free downloadable mp3, and put it in my Apple Music Library. and then created the automation. It selects all the Airplay 2 devices I want to send it to, which is basically everywhere except the Guest Bedroom.

It then plays audio.

I specifically chose the volume as you don't know what volume had been set on the speakers before. 100% may seem excessive , but the volume on the sound file was actually quite low.

And that's it.... for now.

I've got some more work to do on this as when we go out to get the mail, it plays the audio again, and I think it'll be a good idea to have a light show red (Because mail in the UK is in a red post box) to let us know mail has been delivered when we get home, or if we were in the garden.

Still, it's a fun and good start. You don't have to have an outside later box like we do, you could also do it with a door letter box so that when the flap opens it runs the automation.