My goal is to make Prowl as easy-to-understand as possible, but there's always things that could be clarified more. If your question isn't answered below, feel free to contact me for more help!

Do I get an email address that forwards to Prowl?

Yup. Sure do! Check out the Prowlmail page for more information.

How do I get Google Voice pushes?

To set up Google Voice pushes, check out the Prowlmail page.

How do I install Prowl?

Take a look at the installation guide. It should help you with setting up Prowl and get it working just how you expect, including setting up the preferences inside the application.

Are there any web-based services which use Prowl?

You can find a list of web services which use Prowl on the apps page. These services do not require your computer being on to use them, and there are a bunch. Additionally, you can write your own! Use the public API to get anything into Prowl.

Is there a Growl for Windows?

You have two major choices. The first is Growl for Windows (GfW), the second is Snarl.

Instructions for setting up Growl for Windows can be found on the GfW blog post, and instructions for Snarl are missing from the Snarl website: go to the Prowl style, configure it, and set it as your default style.

Please note that neither programs are directly affiliated with Prowl, so problems should be reported to their respective authors.

Why does the Growl Plugin say my password is wrong?

It's very likely your keychain is corrupted. Please run Keychain First Aid:

  1. Launch /Applications/Utilities/Keychain\ Access.app.
  2. From the Keychain Access menu, select Keychain First Aid.
  3. Enter your password into the prompt, and click Repair then click start.

You may also need to make sure your system time is updated, since this may cause problems with the SSL connection.

Is there a rate limit?

The Prowl servers have a rate limit of 1000 notifications per hour from an IP address. In a future release, this will be presented as an error when it occurs. However, there is currently no indication that this is what is happening.

In practice, almost no users end up hitting this. If you think you're running into the issue, please send an email.

I'm not seeing any push notifications, but they show up in the Prowl application!

If you are receiving a large volume (several hundred over a span of a few days) and you stop receiving notifications, you may be caught in Apple's anti-spam net. This is caused by not launching Prowl and is unfortunately unavoidable. Make sure you launch Prowl at least once a week, otherwise Apple will inform the Prowl servers to remove your device from receiving messages.

If the Growl plugin is successfully sending notifications to the Prowl server, and you see the notifications inside the Prowl application, then something is wrong with Push. A common fix is restarting your device, as this resets the connection with the Apple Push server. You can also try toggling WiFi on and off to force a change.

Otherwise, please send the text of any notifications that aren't succeeding to the support email so that we can help diagnose it.

Can I still receive push notifications while my computer is offline (shutdown, sleeping)?

Short answer is that you can only receive Growl notifications while it's online. Prowl's push notifications come from your computer, so they're not able to be delivered without your machine being on to send the notifications to Prowl.

There's a list of web services which use Prowl on the apps page. These services do not require your computer to be on to send you notifications.

Will multiple iOS devices running Prowl all receive push notifications?

With Prowl running on multiple devices, Push notifications will go to all devices which are set up for your account. There is no limit to the number of devices you can have configured.

Can I use multiple computers sending notifications to one device?

Absolutely. You can have as many sources as you want sending notifications to the Prowl servers. All of them will be correctly routed to your devices.

Does everything really have to go through the Prowl servers?

Unfortunately with the way the Apple Push Notification Service works, multiple connections from multiple computers is strongly discouraged. Doubly so if thousands of users are opening individual connections for their notifications. So, sadly yes, a centralized server is necessary.

All traffic to and from the Prowl servers and APNS servers is encrypted over SSL, along with traffic from your computer to and from the Prowl servers. At no point in time are your unencrypted messages sent over-the-wire. However, your messages are stored on the Prowl server until you remove them from within Prowl, or they expire after 10 days.

How reliable is Prowl?

Apple states rather explicitly that the Push messages are not guaranteed to be delivered or be delivered in a fast amount of time. For these reasons, you shouldn't only depend on Prowl for mission-critical alerts.

In either case, you should utilize whatever notification system you have set up to continue to alert until an error condition is cleared, or use multiple alert channels to present the error condition.

Does Prowl have a privacy policy?

Yes. You can view the privacy policy.

I'm an advanced user, is there a way to make scripts send directly to Prowl?

There's a few things you can do. First, check out the public API which will let you integrate your existing applications with Prowl very easily.

If you want something scriptable, the Perl script prowl.pl is available for your use. For more information on how to use it, run perl prowl.pl -help.

You will need to install Crypt::SSLeay, to do so on a Mac (if you are on a release before OS X 10.7, otherwise it is not needed) run sudo cpan install Crypt::SSLeay. For Linux or BSD, your distribution should have a package for it.

The API is subject to throttling, but it should almost never impact a normal user.

You can find a list of API libraries on the API page.

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