Sending an emergency message
Glassbreak Team · Published 2026-07-19
An emergency message is a broadcast to one contact group, delivered across SMS, email, voice, and push, with per-recipient acknowledgment tracking. Message content is end-to-end encrypted by default — encrypted in your browser before upload, readable only by your team's key-holders.
Before your first send
Delivery runs through providers you configure per channel (Emergency → Providers): Twilio or Telnyx for SMS, Postmark or Amazon SES for email, Twilio for voice calls, and push for contacts linked to app users. You can register more than one provider per channel and order them by priority. Without a provider for a channel, that channel is simply skipped — configure at least email and SMS before relying on the system.
Compose and send
- Go to Emergency → Messages → New, or start from a saved template (templates pre-fill subject, body, priority, and a default escalation rule).
- Choose the contact group to alert — a message targets exactly one group.
- Write the subject and body, and set a priority: critical, high, medium, or low.
- Pick a response type: acknowledge-only, yes/no, or multiple choice (for questions like "Are you safe? / Need help?").
- Optionally attach an escalation rule so non-responders are automatically re-notified — see Escalation rules and call trees.
- Send immediately, or save as a draft to send later.
One honest trade-off to understand: because content is end-to-end encrypted, external recipients (who hold no keys) see a neutral notice with an acknowledgment link rather than the message body. If your recipients need to read the body in the SMS or email itself, tick the option to allow plaintext delivery for that message — an explicit, per-message choice.
The acknowledgment page
Every notification carries a unique, single-use link to a public acknowledgment page. Recipients need no account and no app: they open the link, see the request, choose their response, and can optionally share their location. A shared location is encrypted in the recipient's browser before it's sent — Glassbreak's servers never see coordinates in the clear, and only your team's key-holders can decrypt them.
Tracking delivery and responses
The message dashboard shows, live: per-recipient status (pending, delivered, acknowledged, failed), the response breakdown for yes/no and multiple-choice messages, and a per-attempt delivery log recording every channel, provider, and outcome. Acknowledging removes a recipient from any escalation; when everyone has acknowledged (or escalation is exhausted) the message is marked complete.
The Free plan includes 100 emergency messages per month; Team and Business include 2,500 and 10,000 respectively, with overage packs.