How to: Receive e-mail on your not so smart phone.
If you have ever been in a bidding war on ebay, you know that sometimes it can be hard to pry yourself away from your e-mail, especially if you don’t have a smart phone. Here is a quick tip to have your e-mails forwarded to your cellphone as text messages. You will not be able to reply to the messages but at least you will be notified when you need to place another bid.
To do this you simply need to forward all the e-mails you would like to be sent to your cellphone provider’s “SMS Gateway”. (Note: SMS/Text messaging fees will apply)
1. You need your provider’s “SMS Gateway” here is a small list of gateways:
- Alltel: [10-digit phone number]@message.alltel.com
- AT&T (formerly Cingular): [10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net
- Boost Mobile: [10-digit phone number]@myboostmobile.com
- Sprint: [10-digit phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
- T-Mobile: [10-digit phone number]@tmomail.net
- Verizon: [10-digit phone number]@vtext.com
2. Now you need to set up your e-mail account to forward to the e-mails you want want sent to your phone. Here is a list of tutorials on forwarding e-mail with a few different e-mail systems.
3. Test, you can send an e-mail to your provider’s “SMS Gateway” to make sure that works. Then test that your forwarding works within your e-mail system.
Obviously this setup can be used for lots of things not just monitoring ebay. If you have a website you could choose to forward all sales or support e-mails to your phone so that you can provide excellent customer service. If you are a system administrator you could use the “SMS Gateway” to forward alerts to your cellphone. The following example can be used to have a server send your cellphone a message from a script or command line.
-
echo "Content" | mail -s "Subject" 10DigitPhoneNumber@gateway.com
You can redirect the output from any command using the pipe ( | ) operator. This is the same method you would use to send that output to your e-mail.
Hope someone finds this information useful. As always feel free to contact me if you find any inaccuracies or have any questions.
- Daniel.