Why Telegram and Discord, not email

Updated 1 October 2026 · BugsRadar team

Every monitoring tool can send email, and almost nobody reads it. The alert lands in a folder a rule created, between a newsletter and a receipt, and by the time you open it there are four hundred of them. BugsRadar sends to the chat you already read, and that is why it has no email channel at all.

What email does to an alert

• It gets filtered. The first week you read the alerts. The second week you write a rule that moves them to a folder. The folder is where alerts go to be ignored.
• It gets batched. Mail clients fetch on a schedule, group threads, collapse repeats. The one email that mattered sits under forty that didn't.
• It has no edit. An error that repeats a thousand times is a thousand emails, or a digest nobody opens. There is no way to say "same error, count is now 1,248" without sending something new.
• It is read alone. An alert in one inbox is seen by one person, who may be asleep. An alert in a group is seen by whoever is awake.

What a chat does instead

The chat is already open, on the laptop and on the phone, and it already carries the conversations of the people who would fix the problem. A message from your bot arrives next to those conversations, with a push notification that behaves like every other one: you can mute it for an hour, you can't lose it in a folder. In Telegram and Discord the count of repeats is written into the first message, so the thousand repeats are one message that changes. Someone in the group sees it, replies "on it", and the others know. That last part is the one email can't do at all.

Why there is no email channel

We could add one in an afternoon. We don't, because an alert that isn't read isn't an alert, and an email channel would let people set up BugsRadar, feel covered, and find out from a user a month later that the folder had filled up. Telegram, Discord and Pushover are the channels on every plan, including Free, because they are the ones that reach a person. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and PagerDuty are coming with the Business plan for teams that live there.

Where Pushover fits

Not everyone wants errors in a chat. Pushover is a push notification on your phone or desktop, for one person or a delivery group, with no conversation around it. It can't edit a message, so repeats arrive as short summaries at the same moments the live count would update elsewhere, and the stack trace stays out: a notification is not where you read it. Many people run Pushover for themselves and Telegram or Discord for the team, from the same project. See Pushover alerts.

Your bot, your group

Alerts come from a bot you create and a webhook you own, into a chat whose members you choose. BugsRadar never reads the chat; it uses the token only to send its own messages and to update their count. Revoke the token and it stops. That is the other reason for chat over email: you can see exactly what BugsRadar can and can't do.

Where to go next

What each channel needs is on the Channels page; how a busy night stays readable is in Keeping the chat quiet.