Two digests
There are two, and they answer different questions.
- A watcher digest
- One per watcher. Everything in your watched regions that matched that watcher's signals. This is the wide one: you are looking for places you do not know about yet.
- The property digest
- One for your whole account. Everything that happened at the properties you have activated and marked as watched. This is the narrow one: you already know these places and want to hear when they move.
Both go out in the same run each morning, and both stay quiet on a day with nothing to say. Most of the rest of this page is true of both; where they differ, it says so.
When it sends
The digest runs once a day at 12:00 UTC. That is 8am in New York and 5am in Los Angeles through the summer, an hour earlier in each once the clocks go back.
It covers the UTC day that just ended. Everything in the product uses UTC days, which is what keeps the email, the day stepper and the histogram all describing the same thing. If you are on the west coast, a permit issued at 6pm your time falls on the next UTC day and arrives in the following morning's email.
There is one cadence. There is no hourly or weekly option, and no per-watcher send time.
What is in it
Both digests have the same shape. A watcher digest is titled with that watcher's name and count, so several watchers arrive as several separate, individually scannable emails rather than one long one.
- The total.
- A tally by signal, as coloured pills. The colours are the same ones the app and the map use, so a permits line reads green in your inbox and on the screen.
- Up to twelve preview rows, newest first. Each names the signal, the address, the region, the value where the record carries one, and the date.
- A +N more line where there was more than the preview shows.
- A link into the app.
Where a record's own feed publishes no address, the row falls back to the jurisdiction or to coordinates rather than leaving the line blank.
Where the link lands
From a watcher digest, the button opens that watcher, and it deliberately does not carry the date the email was sent. It lands on the newest day that has matches, so a digest opened three days later opens on something rather than on an empty day you have already read.
From the property digest, each row opens the property it happened at, with that record in view.
The first digest
Creating a watcher sends one digest straight away, covering the last seven days rather than yesterday. It is labelled as such, so it is not mistaken for a daily one.
This is the fastest way to find out whether a watcher is configured the way you meant, and it is why building one narrow first is worth doing: you see the shape of the output in a minute instead of tomorrow. If the trailing week had nothing, no first digest is sent.
There is no equivalent for the property digest. Watching a property starts from the moment you turn it on, so its first email is whatever happens next.
The property digest
Every property you activate carries a Watch toggle, on by default. The property digest is one email covering everything that happened at those properties, so a permit pulled or a delinquency opened at a place you already care about reaches you without your going back to look.
It differs from a watcher digest in three ways worth knowing.
- It is your account's, not yours. Watching is a property of the holding, so the whole account shares one watched set and anybody on it can add to or remove from it. A watcher, by contrast, belongs to the person who built it.
- It has no signal filter. A watcher is a question you have narrowed. This is a short list of places you have already chosen, so anything that happens at one of them is worth telling you about.
- It covers everything since the last one that reached you, rather than yesterday specifically. If a send fails, the next one carries the gap forward instead of losing it. That is why it can arrive covering two days.
Watching starts the clock when you turn it on. A property activated with twenty years of history behind it does not produce twenty years of news: the digest begins from the moment you started watching it. Turning the toggle off and on again does not replay the stretch in between.
To browse the same thing rather than wait for it, open My Properties, which is sorted by Recently changed by default.
Quiet days send nothing
A watcher that caught nothing produces no email, and neither does a property digest with nothing at any watched property. That is deliberate: a daily "nothing happened" is the fastest way to teach somebody to filter the whole thing into a folder they never open, which costs them the day something does happen.
So a silent morning means one of two things, and the watchers page tells you which. Open it: the card's fourteen-day sparkline shows whether the watcher is catching things on other days, and the pulse above shows whether the territory itself was quiet. A card that says Nothing in 14 days beside a busy pulse means your filters are the reason.
For the property digest, My Properties sorted by Recently changed answers the same question: if the top of that list is weeks old, the places you are watching have genuinely been still.
When a digest does not arrive
In the order worth checking.
- Was there anything to send? For a watcher, open it and page to yesterday. For the property digest, check My Properties by Recently changed, and check that the properties you expected are actually toggled on. No matches means no email, correctly.
- Is the plan active? The digest is part of the paid product. A lapsed, past-due or cancelled subscription stops it. Billing shows the current state.
- Is your email address confirmed? The digest goes to the confirmed address on your account. If an email change is part-way through, mail still goes to the old one until you enter the code. See changing your email.
- Check spam, then allowlist us. Add our sending address to your contacts, or ask whoever runs your mail to allow it. A corporate filter that has quarantined one digest will usually quarantine all of them.
If all four check out and nothing is arriving, email [email protected] with the watcher name, or the address if it is the property digest. We can see whether the send was attempted and what happened to it.
Who gets which
A watcher digest goes to the person who built that watcher. Watchers are not shared across a team: two people on one account each build and receive their own, which is the point of them. An estimator and a business developer working the same county want different questions asked.
The property digest goes to your account, because the watched set does. Everybody sees the same properties and everybody can change which are watched.
Nothing in either email is private to its recipient. Everything both of them point at is visible to the whole organization through the map, search and My Properties, so a colleague can always open the same record. What differs is who gets told without asking.