On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Tapani Kunnas wrote:
Problem:
I am expecting important email, but getting on line is not very easy (or
may cost a fortune), so I can't get on line to check my mail often enough.
I have a cellular phone where I can send short email messages and receive
them as text messages.
Idea:
Somehow use procmail to send a little notify message to my cell phone
address when the important email has arrived.
Question:
How can this be done?
Presuming your phone is GSM based...
Some GSM (PCS in the US is GSM on a different frequency band) telephone
service providers also have an e-mail to SMS gateway that can accept a
message of up to 160 characters for display on the digial phone.
Alternatively, they may provide access to their SMS service via a dial-up
facility. This facilty will usually accept the connection from a TAP
protocol paging facility, such as a pager extension to mail systems
(eg the pager channel for PMDF or pager add-ons for sendmail). You'd
need to work in conjunction with the service providers to derive a
solution which -may- work.
With all of that sorted out, the procmail script isn't too bad, since
you're copying the message to a different destination. It may look
somewhat like:
:0
<selection-criteria-goes-here>
{
:0 c
! <your-sms-number>@<sms-service.provider>
:0
folder-for-e-mail-message
}
Note that you may need to institute some form of trimming the message to
160 characters before presenting to the SMS service. This may be done by
the pager software or you may have to do it in the above.
Regards
Mike
Mike de Laine Technical Support, Innosoft International, Inc.
"Each success only buys an admission ticket
to a more difficult problem" - HAK