E-mail to SMS gateways

ixtlan

Hi,

I currently have a personal phone with Vodafone. For years I have used the 087xxx@vodafone.ie address for alerting (I work in IT and have computer problems send messages here). This has always worked great and is free.

I'm thinking of switching to Meteor. From what I can see they have a similar system. I do see though that some people comment that sending directly to the phone does not work for some domains, and they send to a separate mymeteor.ie address and then forward e-mails to the real phone/sms address. Any comments on that? However at least it's available, and I believe free?

I also have a work O2 phone, which I seldom use. This also has e-mail->SMS alerting, and it works, though it does have an 11c per message charge. Unfortunately this address seems somehow to have attracted SPAM, so I'd really like to scratch it and create a new address. But... from what I see O2 will no longer give their customers o2.ie addresses, meaning that e-mail->SMS is no longer an option for new customers or indeed for existing customers who don't use their account for 90 days.

Is this really correct? O2 do not support (for new customers) e-mail to sms? Am I missing something? This is a critical service for me. I know many new phones with data plans support push/pull e-mail, but if I'm travelling outside the country I don't want to be forced to enable data services just so I can receive alerts.

The O2 web-site saying from Apr 2010 onwards no webmail accounts. http://www.o2online.ie/wps/wcm/connect/O2/Home/My%20O2/Email
An O2 forum discussion on this. http://forums.o2online.ie/forums/showthread.php?10509-email-amp-webmail


Ix.

Random

With meteor an email to 0861234567@mms.mymeteor.ie will go direct to your phone as mms.

ixtlan

Random wrote: »

With meteor an email to 0861234567@mms.mymeteor.ie will go direct to your phone as mms.

Thanks Random. Can you clarify whether there is a charge for this?

Ix

mathew

I used to use that all the time to forward my emails to my phone.
It stopped working some time last summer tho.
It was free when it worked, just tried it again there. No mms or failure notice yet so i dont know whats up!
I'll let you know if anything happens tho..

mathew

failure notice just arrived..
Reason: 550 requested action not taken, mailbox unavailable (sender not allowed)

Random

It worked for me recently enough. Don't have meteor sim to test though. You're not sending from a hotmail address by chance? I think it used to block them.

It's free when it worked but sometimes was intermittant. They used to have @sms.mymeteor.ie too but that's since been finished.

ixtlan

mathew wrote: »

failure notice just arrived..
Reason: 550 requested action not taken, mailbox unavailable (sender not allowed)

Yes, I came across some discussions about this. It seems that most sending domains are disallowed. However people seem to have got around this by sending mail to their mymeteor.ie e-mail, then setting that to forward to the phone.

I'd appreciate if someone could verify this!

This has me somewhat nervous about leaving Vodafone, where 087xxxx@vodafone.ie works from everywhere and is free. I really need to have this workable and reliable, at least for when I am travelling.

Ix.

Random

I just tested it there with a mate on meteor. I sent it from my own personal ie domain which uses google apps. He recieved it. No issues.

ixtlan

Thank you Random. That sounds like Meteor works fine. Possibly they disable domains like hotmail to prevent spam.

I'm still puzzled about O2. I've placed a comment on their forum to see if I can get clarification.

Ix.

Random

I'm working on an email to sms gateway which uses your webtexts which i hope to have something on later too.

Peanut

You can use o2sms in a script to send server alerts using your free webtexts. I've tried it with O2 and it works fine, but it says it also supports the other networks.

If you have a spare *nix server it would probably be easy enough to run sendmail or something on it, create a local mail account and then get o2sms in a cron job to scan the spool directory for that user when new mails come in, send the sms, and delete/move the mail. (This would also eliminate any spam problems)