Claude Code Email Notifications: How to Set Them Up

Your project works, and now you want it to speak up when something happens. A customer signs up, places an order or has a payment fail, and someone needs to know.

This guide shows you how to set up Claude Code email notifications: emails your project sends automatically when an event happens, to your users or to you. You'll pick the events, brief Claude Code for each one, keep the volume sensible and test everything.

Alerts about Claude Code itself, like a ping when it finishes a task, are a different topic.

Email notifications to your users vs to yourself

Email notifications come in two kinds: ones your users get about their own account, and ones you get about your business. Both are transactional emails, messages your project sends automatically because something happened, and one email service handles both.

Your users' notifications need care with tone and design. Yours can be bare: who, what, when, and a link to see more.

Which events should send an email notification?

An event deserves an email when someone needs to know about it soon, or needs to do something. If nobody would act on it, leave it out or roll it into a summary.

Our guides to new sign-up notifications and weekly summary emails go deeper, and 12 transactional emails every SaaS needs lists the full set.

Setting up Claude Code email notifications, step by step

You connect an email service once, then brief Claude Code for each event. Once your project is live, it sends each notification through SimpleSends on its own, even when Claude Code is closed.

Step 1: Connect an email service

Your project can't send email by itself; it needs an email service. SimpleSends connects to Claude Code as a connector, which is an MCP server: a standard way for Claude Code to work with another service while you build.

1. Sign up and set up your sending address. Create your account on the SimpleSends website and follow the steps there to set up the address you'll send from. To send from your own domain, this includes adding a few DNS records, the settings that tell the internet how your domain works, where your domain is registered. Our guide to verifying a domain for email walks through it.

2. Add the connector. In Claude Code, open Customize, then Connectors. Choose Add, then Add custom connector, and fill in:

   Field	What to enter
   Name	SimpleSends
   MCP server URL	https://mcp.simplesends.com/mcp

3. Log in when Claude prompts you. Use your SimpleSends account.

4. Tell Claude Code it's connected.

   I've connected SimpleSends for all transactional email.

   Claude Code takes it from there, including adding what your project needs to send email. More detail: how to connect an MCP server to Claude Code.

Step 2: Brief Claude Code, one event at a time

Describe each notification the way you'd brief a developer: what happens, who gets the email and what it should say.

A new sign-up, to you:

Whenever someone new signs up, email me at hello@yourcompany.com with their name, their email address and when they signed up. Keep it short and plain. Send me a test first.

What to expect: Claude Code adds the email to your sign-up flow, shows you a draft and sends a test to your inbox. Something like:

SubjectNew sign-up: Jordan Lee

Jordan Lee signed up at 2:14 p.m. today. Email: [their email address] Plan: Free trial See their account: [link]

A new order, to the customer and to you:

When someone pays, send them an order confirmation with what they bought, the amount and a link to their account. Also send me a short note with the same details. Make sure each order sends only one email to each of us, even if the payment notice arrives twice.

What to expect: Claude Code ties both emails to the moment your payment provider confirms the payment. With Stripe, that's a webhook, a message Stripe sends your project when something happens. Stripe can occasionally send the same event twice, hence the last sentence of that brief. Our guide to emails after a Stripe payment goes further.

An alert when something goes wrong:

If a customer's payment fails, email them right away with a friendly note and a link to update their card. Send me a one-line note too, so I know.

More on wording and follow-ups in our payment failed email guide.

Step 3: Review and switch them on

Read each draft, ask for changes in plain English, and say when you're happy. Some changes only reach your live site after a fresh deploy, so ask Claude Code whether that applies.

How do you avoid over-emailing?

Send an email only when someone needs to know now, and roll everything else into a summary. Too many notifications train people to stop reading them.

One event, one email. Ask Claude Code to make sure repeats of the same event don't send duplicates, as in the order brief above.

Swap a stream for a summary. As volume grows, one digest beats dozens of single emails.

I'm getting too many sign-up emails. Replace them with one summary each morning at 8 a.m. my time, listing everyone who signed up in the last 24 hours.

A summary needs something that runs on a timer, called a scheduled job or cron job. If your project is on Vercel's free Hobby plan, scheduled jobs can run at most once a day, and Vercel only commits to the hour: a job set for 1 a.m. can run any time before 2 a.m. Vercel's schedules also run on UTC, so tell Claude Code your time zone.

Let users choose. Optional emails, like a weekly summary, should come with an off switch. Receipts and security emails stay on.

Add a notifications section to the account settings page so users can turn the weekly summary on or off. Keep receipts and password emails always on.

How do you test email notifications?

Test each notification in three ways: a test send from the chat, the real event, and a check of the send logs.

1. Send a test. Ask Claude Code to send a test of each notification to your own address. The first time it uses SimpleSends, Claude may ask your permission. That's normal.
2. Trigger the real event. Sign up with a second address, fill in your own contact form, or place an order. With Stripe, use its sandbox, a test environment where no real money changes hands.
3. Check the send logs. If something doesn't arrive, Claude Code can look it up:

I placed a test order a few minutes ago but didn't get the order note. Can you check in SimpleSends whether it went out and tell me what happened?

Claude Code reads the send logs and explains whether the email went out and, if not, what likely stopped it. Our email testing guide has a full pre-launch checklist, and how to check whether your emails actually sent covers the usual causes.