I’ve been in a geeky mood lately so I thought I would add to the category a bit more with a post on how to receive text alerts on your cell phone when you reveive an email. Its actually pretty simple but also pretty powerful.
Examples on why this is useful:
- With most cell phones having the ability to check email already, you only need to check when you know you have an email and therefore save on bandwidth usage.
- Waiting for a potential employer to return an email, or perhaps to hear back from a friend? Find out right away when then do.
- Anything time-based that can be emailed to you can now be passed along to your phone as well, you don’t have to be in front of a computer to get notified.
Depending on your email provider the scenarios can vary but the objective is relatively simple. Most email providers such as Yahoo or Hotmail or Gmail allow you to set up “rules” to follow when an email is received. An example of a rule that you could set up might be, “Every time I get an email from my sister, automatically delete it (just kidding Britt!)”
Doing the same thing but changing the logic of the rules allows you to set it up to get notifications on your phone. Most cell phone providers create an email address with your cell phone number. They may not publicize this but its true. I could email your cell phone right now as long as I know your cell phone number and your provider (and truth be told, I really only need your cell phone number but that’s another story). For instance let’s say my cell phone number was (858) 555-1234 and my cell phone provider was Cingular. Well, the email address for me would be 8585551234@cingularme.com If I were to send an email to that address, instantly I would receive the text of the email in my cell phone as a text message.
So setting up a rule in my current Yahoo or Hotmail account to automatically forward any email received to this number would basically give me a text message on my cell phone any time someone emailed me. Plus I would be able to see a small snip of the email itself although it would cut off the text after a certain character limit due to text message restrictions.
So what’s your email address? I’ve provided some main carrier information below:
Cingular: your10digitphonenumber@cingularme.com
Nextel: your10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint: your10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: your10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
Verizon: your10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile: your10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
Almost forgot to add the legal mumbo-jumbo of “your carrier may charge you for text messages so be sure to understand your plan before setting this up.” Its easy to rack up 100-200+ text messages a month by doing this.
[...] vents. I’m a big fan of text message alerts. I already mentioned it in one post on how to set up phone alerts when you get an email. I’d say this might be just [...]
Left by Pete Dudchenko - Google Calendar on April 14th, 2006