Logs are for looking things up. Notifications are for the things you should not have to look up: an administrator signing in at three in the morning, or an address being blocked.
Settings
Under Settings → General Settings → Notifications:
| Setting | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Tell me when these roles sign in | No roles | One email per successful login by a user in these roles |
| Tell me when someone is blocked | Off | One email per address that hits the attempt limit |
| Send to | {admin_email} | One or more addresses, comma separated. {admin_email} is the site admin address from Settings → General |
| Summary email | Monthly | Daily, a weekday for weekly, or Monthly |
Both alerts start switched off, so a fresh install is quiet until you choose what you want to hear about. Apply recommended on the settings screen turns the sign-in alert on for administrators. Pick the roles yourself if your editors matter as much as your admins.
The login alert
Sent immediately. It names the user, the method (form, magic link, Google, and so on), the address, the browser and the time. If the login was not you or your team, the recovery screen is the next stop.
Leave your own role out of the list if you sign in many times a day and only want to hear about others; or keep it and filter the emails, since the one time it matters is the one you did not expect.
The blocked alert
Sent once per block, not once per attempt, and no more than one a minute site-wide, so a sustained attack produces a handful of emails rather than hundreds. It names the address, the username that was tried, the browser and why the attempt was refused.
The summary
The digest is four counts for the period: successful logins, failed logins, blocked logins and, where magic login is on, logins by link. A count of zero is left out, and a period where nothing happened sends nothing at all. There are no addresses or usernames in it; that is what the log is for.
Daily sends once a day, a weekday sends weekly on that day, and Monthly sends on the first. Dates are judged in the site timezone, and the hour is whenever the daily task runs, which is set by when the plugin was activated rather than by a time you choose.
Delivery
Alerts go out through wp_mail(), like every other WordPress email. On a host without a
configured mail server they will not arrive; FluentSMTP or any SMTP
plugin fixes that for all of WordPress at once. The dashboard offers to install FluentSMTP when
it is not present.
File-change alerts
These settings do not cover file changes. FluentAuth itself sends no email about them: a scheduled scan posts its findings to the alerts service, which decides what to send and mails the address you registered with. It has its own schedule, and the address is the one on the account rather than a setting here.