Amcrest + Home Assistant
Amcrest cameras can email when they see something, but turning that into something an automation can act on — with the image and what was detected — is another matter. NVR Bridge sits in between and does the translation. There are two ways in: publish to the Mosquitto add-on over MQTT, or fire a webhook automation trigger. Either way the snapshot arrives as a URL you can drop straight into a notification or a picture card. Amcrest's smart-detection events arrive with their type intact, so you can act on the vehicle ones and ignore the rest.
{
"camera": "back-gate-cam",
"at": "2026-08-12T21:04:11Z",
"trigger": "gate / person",
"detections": [
{ "label": "person", "score": 0.94 }
],
"snapshot_url": "https://…/snap.jpg",
"gif_url": "https://…/clip.gif"
}How it works
Create a camera in NVR Bridge and it gets its own private inbound address, something like k7m2p9@relay.nvrbridge.com. That address is how we know which camera an event came from.
In the camera's web UI, go to Setup → Network → SMTP (Email) and enable the email linkage on your motion or smart-detection rule. Set the recipient to the address above, and use our SMTP server and short password — or your own mail provider, if you'd rather.
Running the Mosquitto add-on? Add an MQTT notification pointing at it — over an SSH tunnel if Home Assistant isn't exposed. Prefer automations? Create a webhook trigger, copy its URL, and add a webhook notification that posts to it.
Walk past the camera. The event lands on your timeline within seconds and the Home Assistant alert follows. Every delivery is logged with its result, so a failure is something you can read rather than guess at.
What you get
Questions
Not for the MQTT route. We connect out to an SSH host on your network and publish to the broker over the tunnel. The webhook route does need a reachable URL — Nabu Casa or your own reverse proxy.
Yes. The payload carries a direct link to the snapshot, which both the mobile app's image attribute and a picture card will render without any further work.
Any model with email or FTP alert settings, which is effectively all of them. We don't need ONVIF, RTSP or a particular firmware version. Amcrest shares a firmware lineage with Dahua, so the email settings look familiar and the same short-password rule applies.
No. The camera talks to us over the same outbound connection it already uses to send email. There's nothing to install on your network and no inbound port to open.
Add a camera, point its email at the address we give you, and watch the first event land. About five minutes, all of it in a browser.
Other integrations for Amcrest
Home Assistant with other camera brands