With my eventual goal, once some more parts arrive, to use the ESP8266 to send me notifications when my washing machine is uneven or finished I wanted to be able to have a sensor get triggered and send me an email. I figured I have a PIR motion sensor in stock so why not use that!

I was able to piece together some codes from different example sketches and get the ESP8266 to send an email notifying me that the motion detector was triggered. It took a few iterations. During attempt 1, once the esp8266 was on it just sent emails non-stop. That was really annoying.

After testing my HC-SR501 PIR Motion Sensor and figuring out the proper GPIO pins I finally got it to work properly. I will post the example sketch later. For now the sensor sends an email alert saying it detected motion. I think this would work well for my communal mailbox out in the street. There's no way to tell if there's mail unless you walk out and check. I would love to hook up a battery and set it in the mailbox but I will have to make the sure mail person doesn't plan on stealing it :)