hm yes i think an email is required for alby in general 

 a cloud provider needs a way to message you and because of certain stupidities in nostr they can't rely on using nostr DMs 

 So annoying... Yet another single use throw away email to save 

 oh, wait a sec... to run the hub?

if running it on start9 requires an email it's probably to send you messages about the state of it 

 @Alby can you enlighten us - self hosted alby hub needs email? what for? 

 by default i get emails from my alby hub telling me that it needs upgrades and when that is finished to unlock it again 

 Gross. Email that I have to actually pay attention to. I hate email. 

 haha, yeah, i hardly get any emails these days either, and many of them i don't want either, and have to unsubcribe from them

but what other way are you gonna get alerts? SMS? lol 

 It used to require Alby Account to launch it, since few releases it doesn't anymore.
You can run the Hub without having Account at Alby.

You can receive e-mail notification when it's linked (check in Hub's "Connections" tab)