The short answer: write one narrow rule: “text me when a tenant emails about no heat, a leak, water coming through a ceiling, flooding, a gas smell, or a sewage backup.” Everything else waits for the morning. Leave quiet hours off, since rule alerts inside that window wait until it ends. Keep your maintenance line, too: this covers email only.
What the maintenance line already handles
If you run on AppFolio or Buildium, the after-hours phone problem has a product answer. AppFolio offers a 24/7 maintenance answering service, its Contact Center (AppFolio). Buildium’s Maintenance Contact Center “manages service requests 24/7/365” and “gathers information and determines if emergency or not” (Buildium). Independent answering services do the same for firms on other software. For tenants who call the line or use the portal, that’s the right tool, and nothing here replaces it.
Where it stops is the tenant who emails you. Your address is in their lease packet, in the thread from move-in, in their phone’s contacts. At 10:40 PM they write “water is coming through the bathroom ceiling, what do I do?” to you, not the portal. It sits in your inbox with the parking complaint and the owner’s question about last month’s statement.
Your phone’s mail app can’t sort that out. It notifies you about everything, or about a filtered slice that has nothing to do with emergencies: the Gmail iPhone app offers the Primary tab or “High priority only,” which is Gmail’s own judgment (Gmail Help); Outlook offers “Favorite People Only” (Microsoft Support), which would mean starring three hundred tenants and getting every one of their emails. Outlook’s text-message notifications were discontinued (Microsoft Support).
The alfred_ way: one narrow rule
At the desk, open chat in the alfred_ web app and type the rule, or text it to alfred_:
Text me when a tenant emails about no heat, a leak, water coming through a ceiling, flooding, a gas smell, or a sewage backup.
alfred_ reads the rule back to you as a sentence. This is a content rule: alfred_ reads each new email and judges whether it’s about one of those things. That’s why it catches “the ceiling in the hall bath is dripping” and “no heat since 6” without the tenant using your words. It’s also why the list should stay short. Every item you add is another judgment call that can reach your phone at midnight; add “noise complaint” and you’ve rebuilt the problem you started with.
What stays off your phone is everything else. By default, alfred_ doesn’t text you about an individual email unless it matches a rule you wrote; the morning brief is a separate once-a-day summary. The rent question, the parking dispute and the owner’s statement question wait for the desktop in the morning. If tenants write to more than one address you control, connect each one (up to six) and say the rule covers all of them.
When a text arrives, you can handle the first step from bed:
- “Forward that to dispatch@yourplumber.com and say it’s urgent, tenant is home.” alfred_ shows you the forward before it sends, and sends when you say yes.
- “Reply to the tenant: turn off the valve under the sink if you can, a plumber will call you within the hour.” Same preview, same yes.
- “Remind me at 7 to call the owner about 14 Oak Street.” You get a text at 7.
Quiet hours decide whether this works
Quiet hours are off by default. If you turn on quiet hours, rule alerts that arrive inside the window wait and come through together as one text when quiet hours end; on a quiet day such as “don’t text me on weekends” they aren’t sent at all. A leak email at 11 PM inside your quiet hours reaches your phone when the window ends, not at 11 PM. So for emergency alerts, leave quiet hours off, or keep the emergency rule narrow enough that you’re glad to get every text it sends. You can check the setting in Settings on the desktop or in the iPhone app; Quiet hours in the docs covers the setting.
One more setting lives on the phone, not in alfred_: if you use Do Not Disturb or a Sleep Focus overnight, a text won’t wake you unless you allow texts from alfred_ through it.
Where each step happens
- Desktop, once: write the rule in chat, confirm quiet hours are off, connect each inbox tenants write to. In the morning, the rest of the tenant mail is waiting there.
- Text, after hours: the alert, a forward to your vendor, a reply to the tenant, a reminder for the morning.
- iPhone app, when you need to see it: open the email and the photos the tenant attached; attachments open in the app.
More examples of what you can text are in What you can ask via text. The general version of text alerts is on Get a text when an important email arrives, and texting alfred_ is described on the SMS page.
The honest caveat: this is not a maintenance line
alfred_ texts you 2 to 5 minutes after an email arrives, only for email that reaches a connected inbox, and only as reliably as a text reaches your phone at 2 AM. It doesn’t answer calls, doesn’t triage a tenant on the phone, and doesn’t dispatch anyone. A tenant with water pouring through a ceiling should be calling your emergency line, and a tenant who smells gas should get out and call the gas utility or 911; your move-in packet and portal should say so plainly. This rule is for the tenants who email anyway, so their email doesn’t wait until 8 AM.