UK - email notifications to SMS

[+teamhillside]

Just wondering if anyone had any useful pointers on this issue.

 

I don't check mails over the weekend much, and I'd like to be prompted for when there are new caches close to my location. So I use the notifications to generate the appropriate emails when a new cache is published.

 

Using gmail, these notifications are automagically forwarded to a specific email account after being received in my main geocaching mail account.

 

I came across a service provided by x-on (no link provided, but you can track it down if you are interested) that allows 3 free emails to be sent to a mobile by SMS per day. I don't anticipate receiving more than 3 per day (usually that many per week would be a maximum) so I thought I might be able to use that to receive some up to date notification.

 

I can email perfectly fine to the SMS number and receive the SMS quickly. But when the email is created automatically (either by filtering by gmail and forwarding, or alternatively using xfruits to create an RSS from gmail and then use xfruits again to email the RSS feed to the SMS email number) it doesn't arrive. I suspect that the x-on free service is ignoring emails where the header shows that it isn't a "normal" email - i.e. forwarded etc.

 

Does anyone know of any way of making this work, or an alternative way of getting a few emails sent to SMS? My mobile provider (virgin) doesn't have a working email to SMS gateway for PAYG customers (despite some websites claiming that they do).

 

THanks a lot for any help / pointers.

 

Matt

[+teamhillside]

Just wondering if anyone had any useful pointers on this issue.

 

THanks a lot for any help / pointers.

 

Matt

 

In the absence of any hints / tips here, I've worked out a solution for myself which I thought I'd share.

 

It involves using twitter, which I'm not a fan of, but does seem to offer some free services which might be worth using.

 

What you need

Ideally two twitter accounts

A twittermail account

Possibly a tweetsms account (unless you are on Vodafone, O2, Orange or Three)

 

What I did

I set up two twitter accounts - e.g. @caching1 and @caching2

I setup a twittermail account which was linked to @caching1

I set gmail up to forward new cache notification emails ("Published") to the email address that I established with twittermail

I then set @caching2 to "follow" @caching1

 

This means that @caching2 will see the publication of new tweets by @caching1 (which are posted automatically by email from gmail)

 

I have a virginmobile phone, so twitter can't automatically forward tweets to my mobile by SMS.

 

So I therefore setup a tweetsms account. This costs £0.05p per message to send to my phone, so I reckon about £2.50 per year will work fine for me with the amount of notifications we get.

 

I've set tweetsms to text me any new tweets by @caching1 which it does by monitoring @caching2's twitter account.

 

I believe that the tweetsms functionality is available for free from twitter itself in the UK if you do have a phone on the right network.

 

Hope this is of some use to somebody!

 

I was inspired to solve this problem as by chance I achieved my first FTF this weekend because I happened to check the email at just the right time. I want to take luck out of the equation to help me find more nice fresh caches!!

 

Cheers!

 

Matt