Communications

Motornauts supports multiple communication channels, each controlled by feature modules and readiness state.

Customer notification center

During the Ignition rollout, eligible customer portal pages show a notification bell and a protected Notifications page. The inbox groups saved updates into Approvals, Needs attention, Messages, and Account updates, shows unread totals, and supports All, Unread, and Read filters. Category counts appear only when positive; zero-unread categories remain selectable. Each item has an accessible read-state icon. Selected category names are not repeated on every row. Page controls appear when another page is available, with recovery to the newest page if older results disappear. Choose Refresh for a newer server snapshot; the center does not claim realtime or background polling.

Inbox read state means that the update was viewed in Motornauts. It is not an SMS or email delivery or read receipt. Provider delivery failures are not automatically customer Blockers, and historical dispatch attempts are not reconstructed as inbox history. Detailed or sensitive information remains on the authorized estimate, invoice, payment, vehicle, or service page rather than inside notification copy.

Current saved notifications are informational. Motornauts does not infer a destination from the message text; open the relevant authorized portal area when the notification does not offer a separate action.

Channel selection

Each supported event selects from SMS, email, and in-app delivery. The system checks channel preferences, feature availability, contact details, and provider readiness. SMS additionally requires explicit current consent and respects withdrawal or opt-out. Every selected or skipped attempt is recorded. A channel failure does not automatically authorize a send through another channel.

Use the authorized portal for estimates, invoices, private documents, and detailed service status.

Phone availability alone is not SMS consent. When an explicit current SMS grant is unavailable, Motornauts records a skipped attempt and keeps the in-app/portal and eligible email paths available. Post-delivery feedback currently has no authoritative SMS-preference source, so its SMS path remains skipped until that separate preference capability is approved and implemented.

SMS sends require a durable queued routing decision. Direct queueing without that decision is rejected. Appointment reminders re-read the tenant customer’s latest SMS consent or withdrawal evidence at send time; missing consent creates a durable CONSENT_NOT_GRANTED skipped attempt, while withdrawal/opt-out creates OPTED_OUT. Neither path creates an SMS provider message, though an enabled email or in-app reminder can still proceed independently.

Reminder timing is based on the confirmed or rescheduled appointment start. Motornauts creates the 24-hour reminder only when the appointment is more than 24 hours away and creates the two-hour reminder only when it is more than two hours away. A window that has elapsed, or is exactly at its boundary, is skipped. Rescheduling cancels obsolete pending schedules before retaining the relevant new windows.

The database schedule remains the source of truth if the queue is temporarily unavailable. The worker recovers schedules that were saved without queue evidence, using the same stable job identity. If a queued reminder is delivered to a worker before its persisted due time, the worker moves that job back to the stored due time without claiming the reminder or creating a notification attempt. A queue or channel-dispatch failure remains retryable; one queued channel does not cause another channel’s durable work to be discarded.

Email template safety

Tenant Admins open Settings → Email and delivery to choose from the verified service and identity catalog. The workspace shows enabled, draft, and published counts, then keeps delivery preference, structured content, allowed variables, and preview together for the selected template. An unknown template address fails safely; choose the template from the catalog instead of editing the URL.

Preview current edits refreshes desktop, mobile and plain-text previews without saving. Your edited fields remain in place if previewing fails. Saving creates a draft for review. Publishing creates the version used for future sends; already queued deliveries keep their recorded content. Required identity emails remain enabled. A delivery producer being unavailable does not mean the structured template is invalid, and previewing sends no email. The desktop/mobile HTML preview is isolated, and the plain-text version remains available.

Email templates use structured fields rather than raw HTML. Tenant-authored text cannot include raw links, scripts, styles, provider payloads, private document links, tokens, secrets, or password fields. CTA buttons use system-controlled URL variables: service emails open the customer portal, and staff invitation emails use the one-time invitation URL resolved during delivery. Do not paste credentials, one-time values, provider diagnostics, private links, backend messages, or request IDs into template fields or support notes.