This is so twisted that I have to write it down to believe it works…
I’m running GMail Mobile on my Blackberry 8700c, with a data plan, but not a Blackberry Data Plan. This means I don’t get to use Blackberry push email. But I like the immediate notification of new mail that Blackberry email provides. I don’t need it for all email, but I do need it for some.
Easy, you say – Just have GMail forward your email to your SMS. There is a problem with that approach:
- Long emails get broken into multiple 160-byte SMS messages. I'm on AT&T/Cingular, and I haven't found a way to tell them that my SMS should be truncated after the first 160 bytes. When someone sends me a couple of 16000-byte messages, there goes my 200 prepaid SMS, and they start whacking me for 20 cents per SMS.
- GMail insists on forwarding the entire message. I don't want to send the entire email. (See above.)
So I started looking for email forwarding service that would truncate my messages, when it occurred to me that there is a famous service that truncates messages to SMS length – Twitter.
Hmmm… In order to post to Twitter via email, I could use Twittermail. But how to get my twits sent to my SMS? Twitter won’t let me follow myself, soooo… I set up a second Twitter account and a second Twittermail account.
- I have a GMail filter that forwards messages from VIPs to Twittermail #2.
- Twittermail #2 sends them to Twitter account #2.
- Twitter account #1 "follows" Twitter account #2.
- Twitter account #1 sends twits to my Blackberry SMS.
It’s actually even more complex. I have two Blackberrys (Blackberry1 and Blackberry2). I do have Blackberry Data Service on Blackberry2, but I don’t want to carry it around. So Blackberry2 forwards all emails to GMail, where steps 1-4 above take over.
Surprisingly, I actually get IM notification chirps from my Blackberry within a few seconds of the original email. (I suspect this mash-up is going to be fragile.)
Idea to follow-up on: Could I send Twits to an IM client running on my Blackberry, with IM alerts, and avoid using up my SMS quota?
Idea2 to follow-up on: Could GMail forward to an IM server via an email to IM gateway, and then I could try an IM client running on my Blackberry, with IM alerts, and avoid using up my SMS quota?