Tuesday, November 27, 2007 Limpag: Smart’s TextMail and mobile alerts By Max Limpag Celltalk
E-MAIL TO SMS. One of my mobile experiments, one that spanned more than a year, finally drew to a close this month with my rediscovery of Smart’s TextMail.
I’ve long been trying one service after another in an effort to get my e-mails sent as text messages. The answer, you might say, is simple: buy a Blackberry.
I’m not, however, prepared to spend thousands for the device and its mobile e-mail solution when I had only very specific alerts in mind: website availability and tasks reminders.
For regular e-mails, I am perfectly satisfied with the GMail for mobile Java application. I run several websites and need to know whenever the servers, where these are hosted, encounter problems so that I can work on fixing it.
All the sites I run are monitored by free services that check every few minutes or so whether these are available Whenever the monitoring services I use detect any of the my sites to be down, it immediately sends an e-mail to alert me of the problem. I wanted to be able to get that message as an SMS alert. Many of these services offer SMS alerts, but for a fee. Of those that offer free SMS alerts, they usually do not include Philippine mobile numbers.
TASK MANAGEMENT. I also manage my tasks (work-related, blog-related, and personal) online. I used to do it with Rememberthemilk.com, a free online task manager that offers SMS reminders to Philippine phone numbers.
The problem was that in several instances, the SMS message came in late, several hours after I wanted to be reminded of a task Remember themilk.com is also limited to task management. I found a better service with Scrybe at iScrybe.com.
Scrybe is a really cool service for managing tasks and storing notes. It has an interface that’s such a joy to use. It’s an invitation-only service so if you want an account, leave me a note in my blog and I’ll send you an invitation.
I transferred my tasks management to Scrybe because with it, I do not need to use another service for my notes. The only problem with Scrybe is that it doesn’t offer SMS alerts for Philippine phone numbers. What it offers is sending alerts to a mobile phone e-mail address (your mobile phone number@your provider’s web address). For several months, I unable to use its SMS alerts.
I knew the best solution was Smart’s TextMail, but for several days of playing with the service, I couldn’t activate it—not even when a tech support staff from Smart guided me through it. When I still couldn’t activate the service, I gave up trying and made a mental note to try it again after a few months.
Early this month, I tried Smart TextMail again and found that it had been improved.
I was told that it’s now being managed by a content provider. The service also has been transferred to www.mySmart.com.ph. I tried registering for the service about two weeks back and in no time, my mobile e-mail address was set up.
If you don’t explicitly register for a username, your mobile e-mail will be your Smart number @mySmart.com.ph. The mobile number is in international format so if yours starts with 0918, it will be written as 63918. To get your own personalized Smart TextMail address, send REG to 200. The username you enter will become the first part of your e-mail address. After registration, add the e-mail address of the servers that send you alerts so that their messages are immediately sent to your phone. If you get a message from someone not in the address book, the server just notifies you of the message and asks you to reply with “G” if you want to get the entire message. In my case, I added to my address book the e-mail addresses of the senders of my website availability notices and the e-mail address Scrybe users to send reminders.
ALERTS COME ON TIME. In using the service for more than a week, I found that I get the alerts as soon as these are sent. I know immediately whenever any of the web servers I use is down. With the alert, I can then check the site and send a support request to the web host. Scrybe notifications for tasks deadlines are also received on time and I’m now able to fully take advantage of it’s task management service. I’m just using some of my TextMail account’s services.
It is a full mobile e-mail solution if your more comfortable with managing e-mail using text. It even generates access numbers for e-mail addresses. Any text message you send to these access numbers are processed and sent as an e-mail message to your contact. I just hope that Smart TextMail maintains this quality of service. It has become an indispensable tool for me.
