Messaging Overview

ATM is automated trading software. Often you'll start it and go and do other things. But yet you will probably also want to be alerted when important events happen. ATM gives you a variety of ways to be notified.

What you do is create Broadcast Settings (Admin > Broadcast Settings). This is where you tell ATM what kind of messages you want to be notified of, and how you want to be notified. For example, you may choose to be notified by email for all kinds of messages. And, in addition, you want any error messages to be sent to your phone.

With the appropriate Broadcast Settings in place, you then just go about your business using ATM as normal. Backtesting, automated trading, alerts, etc, send out messages, and these messages are broadcast (or not) as per the Broadcast Settings.
 

To your email address

Email messages can be sent to any email address.

However, you have to first set up an email address to be used as the sending address. That is, the address that goes in the "From:" field. And this sending address must be a Gmail account (from Google). Read more here.

Gmail allows 500 messages to be sent per day from a single account. If we simply used our Gmail account to send the messages, we can reach 500 messages easily. But everyone using their own Gmail accounts would make it very difficult to reach 500.
 

To notification handlers

There are a couple of free notification handlers out there which aim to standardise your messaging experience. The theory is that other software sends their messages to these handlers, and the handlers show them to you on your computer, or not, or send the messages to you (via email, SMS, etc), or not, based on your settings.

In short, you can get ATM to send messages to these notification handlers, and the handlers work out what to do with the messages based on your settings.
 

Growl

Mac users will be very familiar with Growl, which has a Windows equivalent suitably called Growl For Windows. From their website:

Growl gives you full control over how you are notified and what action (if any) you want to take in response to the notification. You can choose to be alerted with a visual indicator or an audible alert, both, or neither. You can choose the type of display that is shown, whether the display remains on the screen, the importance of the notification, and even if the notification should be forwarded to another computer. You can have notifications that trigger an email, run a script, launch a program, or are read out loud.

Snarl

Snarl is very similar to Growl. It's up to your personal preference as to which you install. No harm in using both.
 

Notify.io

Notify.io is another notification handler, but is slightly different in that you don't need to install anything on your computer. Rather you just create an account on the Notify.io website. (Be warned that at time of writing, Notify.io was in the alpha stages of development).
 

To your mobile/cell phone

There are two different SMS providers (or "gateways") that can be connected to directly by ATM. One is free with limited coverage, and the other (Clickatell) is not free but covers most of the planet. It's pretty cheap though. See here for more info.

In addition, there is at least one more SMS provider available indirectly. You can get ATM to send messages to Notify.io, and in your Notify.io account you can set up TextAuth as your SMS "outlet". Messages would be sent from ATM > Notify.io > TextAuth > your mobile/cell phone. Most likely there are other options available through Growl and/or Snarl.

And that's just the possibilities for traditional SMS messages. ATM can also connect to Notifo, which can push messages to your iPhone, Android or Blackberry.
 

Via Twitter

Twitter has 2 kinds of messages - tweets and direct messages (DMs). Tweets are public for all to see. DMs go to an individual and are similar to email. However, DMs only work for people that are already following you. Luckily, you can DM yourself (and we imagine this is how people would use Twitter for notifications).
 

Other

If you are normally in front of your computer, the popup-notifier and/or icon in the system tray might be of use.
 

Setup Instructions

Some broadcast methods need a sending address, some need the receiver to first "allow" them to send messages, and so on. Setup instructions are all on the "Messaging" tab of the Options window (Admin > Options).

See also:

• Default Broadcast Settings