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Communications Handhelds Hardware

Email Notification via SMS in the US? 41

Posted by Cliff from the never-missing-an-important-email dept.
Joel McShiston asks: "Back in Europe I had set up a system through which urgent emails matching certain criteria were automatically forwarded upon arrival to a (free) email account which my cell phone carrier (Vodafone) provided for free with each account - {cell number}@vodafone.es. At the carrier's site I could then turn 'SMS notification of new email' on and would receive a text message telling me to check my email each time a matching email came through. I'll be soon moving to the US and would like to know whether any of you has a similar (or better) system working over there. Which kind of SMS-email 'interfacing' are you able to do on that side of the pond?"
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Email Notification via SMS in the US? More

Email Notification via SMS in the US?

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  • I know for a fact that AT&T give you an address @attwireless.net and T-Mobile give you a username@tmomail.net.

    Of course, you'd be lucky to get any reception anywhere unpopulated like, say, MANHATTAN! with either of those services.

    -- Just a bitter cell phone loser
  • @vtext.com will be sent to you as an SMS message.

  • Tmobile (Score:2, Informative)

    by CaNeS ( 13483 )
    Tmobile does this and has for quite a while.

    It's usually pretty reliable. I've only had problems when my mail server had problems.

  • Easy if you have your own domain (Score:5, Informative)

    by pauljlucas ( 529435 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:09PM (#9864091) Homepage Journal
    See my instructions [mac.com]. While specifically for Verizon, the technique should work for any carrier that supplies you with an e-mail address.

    • I didn't give it a good look, but on initial inspection your perl script has potential for some odd display bugs because many of you regex's don't use the zero-width ^ match. Like if you got a message (and I have in the past) formatted "<johnq@public.com> John Q. Public", it'll spit out as "johnq@public.com> John Q. Public".

      If I'm right it doesn't take much to fix :| just do /^([^<]+)/ or whatever instead. Cool proccess though, I'll probably use it :D

    • Re:Easy if you have your own domain (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @03:55PM (#9864745)
      I don't think you need a separate script to provide notification - if you just forward the e-mail to your Verizon account you will get however many first bytes of the e-mail, which is usually sufficient to figure out what it's about. You just have to make sure that the message is explicitely addressed to your vtext.net account or it might [cctec.com] get dropped by their server. I use something like this:

      :0 c:
      * CONDITION_GOES_HERE
      $DEFAULT
      :0 Af: /var/tmp/.vtext.lck
      | formail -b -f -I "To: 7035551212@vtext.com" -I "Received"
      :0 A:
      !7035551212@vtext.com
      "CONDITION_GOES_HERE" should be a regexp that selects your message as worthy of forwarding to the phone (mine are $0.02 a piece). It looks like I also had to get rid of the "Received" header for some reason - perhaps Verizon drops messages if a count of "Received" headers exceeds a certain threshhold.

      ...and of course you'll need to replace 7035551212 with your number.

      • I don't think you need a separate script to provide notification - if you just forward the e-mail to your Verizon account you will get however many first bytes of the e-mail, which is usually sufficient to figure out what it's about.
        Probably true; however, I still prefer to "clean up" the e-mail and grab just the sender's name and subject so I can see the name at a glance.

  • .procmailrc (Score:5, Informative)

    by JeffL ( 5070 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @02:10PM (#9864092) Homepage
    There is almost always an e-mail to sms gateway address, such as 5555555555@t-mobile.com (or whatever). I have a .procmailrc that forwards interesting e-mails to my phone. It strips quoted text and other stuff, to squeeze as much as possible into the allowed 160 characters.

    I've been using my phone as a biff for years. If an e-mail is important I know about it right away, if it isn't important I can deal with it later or ignore it completely.

  • Verizon ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by arhar ( 773548 )
    ... Verizon, which by far provides the best service in the US, has this feature:

    vtext.com [vtext.com]
    • The vtext.com site and addresses is ONLY an e-mail-to-SMS gateway. You can't send messages to those addresses exceeding 160 characters (which rules out 99% of e-mail). vtext.com is NOT an ordinary POP or IMAP e-mail account.

      However, Verizon acquired airbridge.net and will, if you ask Verizon's data group, set you up with a POP e-mail account there. But e-mail sent there has nothing to do with your phone.

  • It works just as you described with Sprint. Also, Yahoo has SMS notification ability. It can let you know if you have an email; plus, with the Yahoo WAP and a data-capable phone, you can get into your Yahoo account and read email, IM etc.
  • just became a member of Slashdot and trying to figure out how i can post a question. Any help would be appreciated.
  • Among other services mentioned, nextel also has this feature.

    When I was still on dial-up I had it set up so that when my gateway machine was kicked offline it would redial and and notify me on my phone, along with sending me my new ip.
  • echo '\'$USER', "|'$HOME/.do_sms_spawn'"' > ~/.forward
    cat >~/.do_sms_spawn.in <<EOF
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <unistd.h>

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    chdir("HOME");
    execlp("BASH", "bash", "HOME/.do_sms", NULL);
    exit(1);
    }
    EOF
    sed 's/HOME/'$HOME'/g;s/BASH/'`which bash`'/g' <~/.do_sms_spawn.in >~/.do_sms_spawn.c
    cc ~/.do_sms_spawn.c -o ~/.do_sms_spawn
    cat >~/.do_sms <<EOF
    #!/bin/bash
    do=0 #0=email,1=SMS
    part=0 #0=headers,1=body,2=tagline
    msg=
    debug=n
    exec >/dev/null 2>&1
    debuglog=$HOME/sms-debug.log
    while : ; do
    read line || break
    if [ "$debug" = "y" ] ; then echo $part$do $line >$debuglog ; fi
    if [ $part -eq 0 -a "$line" = "" ] ; then
    part=1
    elif [ $part -eq 0 -a "$(echo $line|cut -c1-4)" = "To: " ] ; then
    echo "$line" | fgrep "+sms@" >/dev/null 2>&1 && do=1
    elif [ $part -eq 0 -a "$(echo $line|cut -c1-6)" = "From: " ] ; then
    msg=$(echo $line|cut -c7-|cut -d\< -f2|cut -d\> -f1)
    elif [ $part -eq 1 -a "$(echo $line|cut -c1-2)" = "--" ] ; then
    part=2
    elif [ $part -eq 1 -a $do -eq 1 ] ; then
    msg="$msg $line"
    fi
    done
    if [ $do -eq 1 ] ; then
    msg=$(echo $msg|cut -c 1-160)
    msg=$(echo -n "$msg" | od -t xC | cut -c8- | sed 's/ /%/g' | tr -d '\n')
    if [ "$debug" = "y" ] ; then echo msg: $msg >$debuglog ; fi
    s='http://208.62.68.135/msgresult.shtml?min='`cat ~/.cellno`'&msg='
    wget -q "$s$msg" -O /dev/null 2>&1
    fi

    EOF
    chmod 700 ~/.do_sms
    um=`umask`
    umask 077
    echo XXXXXXXXXX > ~/.cellno
    umask $um
    mail Hi there. | $USER'+sms@'$HOST

  • I don't trust the system (Score:3, Informative)

    by barzok ( 26681 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:54PM (#9866273)
    We use Verizon at work for sending SMS messages to phones for system/on-call notifications. We have had a few occasions where messages have been delayed by anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours. We've also had complete outages (average one day/year).

    Depending on how urgently you need to know you've got mail, this may not be acceptable to you.

  • In the US - consider the costs... (Score:3, Informative)

    by SD_92104 ( 714225 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:07PM (#9866308)
    Considering that the OT comes from Europe, there is a very important thing to add - you will pay for incoming SMS (or have them deducted from your bucket of allowed SMSs - depending on your provider and/or plan). As opposed to Europe (at least the countries I lived in) where all incoming communication is free, you will pay for that in the US - both, for voice as well as SMS. So, depending on your email volume, you might re-think whether this is really worth it... (I use it - T-Mobile customer - and their website allows you to set up rather precise filters for which messages/accounts/senders/... you receive a notification)
  • If you're a Sprint PCS user, you get a username@sprintpcs.com address. You can set it to notify you on your phone when you receive an e-mail to that address, and you can read the e-mail on your phone.
    • With Sprint PCS, there are actually two types of messaging: your standard SMS (only recently rolled out), and Sprint's own ShortMail. (Just to confuse you, they named them similarly, but they are not.)

      To send an SMS message DIRECTLY to a Sprint PCS phone, especially older, pre-SMS phones, use aaapppnnnn@messaging.sprintpcs.com address. To send a ShortMail message, aaapppnnnn@sprintpcs.com -- when mail is received here, you'll get an "alert" on your phone that you have a new message, which you then have to
  • I'd like to do the same thing in Australia. Using Vodafone.

    Any ideas ?

    I don't think we have a free email address here which goes to a mobile phone.
  • I used a similar approach while living in the USA with my prepaid Virgin cell phone. There is an e-mail address associated with your phone. I don't remember the exact format (it was something like number@vmobile.com) but finding out is as easy as to send to yourself an e-mail from the cell phone, and look at the from.

    Interestingly, Virgin does not charge for receiving a SMS as opposed to other cell phone companies.

  • I do it via the web (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @02:47PM (#9871151) Homepage
    Both my previous cellular provider (AT&T) had and my current provider (Sprint) has a web page that anyone can go to and fill out a form to send a text message to one of their phones, given the phone number.

    So I simply went to that page, examined the form to see how it worked, and then wrote a simple little Perl script to do the same thing.

    I can then invoke that Perl script from procmail to send me notices when I receive email I'm particularly interested in.

  • and have some cash to burn do what my employer does and set yourself up with Verizon and Color BlackBerry 7750's [verizonwireless.com]. It's nice having my email everywhere I go and the browser is handy for important sites (THough, you need the $5000 BlackBerry Enterprise Server for web iirc). Plus it has a calendar, games, messaging clients, etc. The only thing I don't like doing with it is talking to people - it just doesn't fit my hand right!
  • I'm not in the US but in France and I have SMS notification for each e-mail received on the e-mail account provided by the operator. I receive in the SMS the e-mail of the sender and the subject of the message.

    However I do not consider this to be a good idea, as spammers found this e-mail address five months ago. I now receive about 4 SMS each day related to e-mail notification for a spam received. My SMS box is quickly full (10 entries on my phone including sent SMS).
    The operator provides absolutely no me

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