Netdata email and the Microsoft 365 Basic auth shutdown
Netdata is a self-hosted, real-time monitoring agent for a server or a fleet of them. It sends:
- health alerts when a monitored metric crosses a threshold - disk full, CPU pinned, a service down
None of that is noisy, and none of it is noticed when it stops. Mail that is never sent leaves no error on any screen anybody looks at.
What changes at the end of December 2026
If these messages go out through Microsoft 365 with a username and a password, Exchange Online stops accepting that by default. Not throttles — refuses. An administrator can switch it back on, which buys time rather than solving it: Microsoft announces the final removal date in the second half of 2027, and tenants created after December 2026 do not get the option at all.
Which of the four you are looking at is decided by the exact string the server sends back.
Why this application fits a free relay
An alert fires only when something is actually wrong, to the person running the server. Volume is naturally low unless something is badly broken, and nobody outside that person sees the sender address.
That is the honest test, and it is worth applying before the settings: mail leaves from a generated @msgwing.com address rather than your own domain, and the cap is 200 messages a day. For an invoice or a shop receipt that is disqualifying. For Netdata it usually is not.
Settings
Netdata itself has no SMTP fields - health_alarm_notify.conf only turns email on and sets the sender/recipient. The actual relay is delegated to the sendmail command on the host, or - the common case in Docker - to msmtp, configured in msmtprc.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
host | mx.msgwing.com |
port | 587 |
tls | on |
tls_starttls | on |
auth | on |
user | your @msgwing.com login |
password | your @msgwing.com password |
from | your @msgwing.com login |
Register at msgwing.com first — the login and password are generated and shown once.
The part worth reading twice
| These are msmtp directives, not Netdata’s own configuration - Netdata calls whatever sendmail-compatible binary is on the PATH and has no visibility into whether it works. A misconfigured msmtprc fails silently from Netdata’s side: the alert fires, Netdata believes it sent, and nothing arrives. Test with the command “echo test | msmtp your@address” before trusting an alert to reach anyone. |
Where these names come from
Every field above was read off Email alert notifications, Netdata’s own documentation, rather than recalled. If that page and this one disagree, that page is right and this one is out of date — say so.
Related
- Other self-hosted applications
- Connection values and every other application
- All SMTP AUTH error messages
- Tools that are a better fit than this one
Last reviewed 2026-08-29.
Updated 29 Aug 2026