Email Notification via SMS in the US?

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Email Notification via SMS in the US?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 2, 2004 @06:32AM 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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Tmobile by CaNeS · 2004-08-02 07:09 · Score: 2, Informative

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 by pauljlucas · 2004-08-02 07:09 · Score: 4, Informative

See my instructions. While specifically for Verizon, the technique should work for any carrier that supplies you with an e-mail address.

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1. Re:Easy if you have your own domain by fiftyvolts · 2004-08-02 08:29 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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
  
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2. Re:Easy if you have your own domain by gtrubetskoy · 2004-08-02 08:55 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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 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.
.procmailrc by JeffL · 2004-08-02 07:10 · Score: 4, Informative

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 ... by arhar · 2004-08-02 07:11 · Score: 2, Informative

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

vtext.com
If you have Cingular (tested: sun4-solaris) by orangesquid · 2004-08-02 11:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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I don't trust the system by barzok · 2004-08-02 13:54 · Score: 2, Informative

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... by SD_92104 · 2004-08-02 14:07 · Score: 3, Informative

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)
1. Re:In the US - consider the costs... by Mistah+Blue · 2004-08-03 14:00 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  SMS incoming is free for AT&T Wireless (probably depending on your plan). Send to you_cell_number@mobile.att.net.
I do it via the web by harlows_monkeys · 2004-08-03 07:47 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.