Solo Technology

This is a follow-up to “I Want One… No I Don’t“; an article in which I vacillated aimlessly between lusting for a BlackBerry and denying the obvious attraction. In hindsight, perhaps a bit pitiful to read. 

After calming down and spending time on proper reflection I can say that I do not want a BlackBerry (or a Mogul ).  Their respective geek’ish siren songs are strong, but I’ve realized they would just tie me up with work more than I already am.

In fact, I’ve realized that the real need is a way to be notified when important emails show up — not when any or every email shows up!  That way lies madness. Once I realized that was my goal, the solution wasn’t far behind.

Poor Man’s Notification System

I’ll put the word out to folks that if there’s something considered an emergency to use a different email address.  Something clever like eeks@mydomain.com. 

I configured my Hosted Google account to have “eeks” as an alias — otherwise known as a nickname in Google-ese:

(no, “eeks” isn’t the address I really used, and it wasn’t on this pictured domain either — so save the joke emergencies!)

Google Mail has a pretty decent little filtering setup, so catching these and handling them is easily done.  For example:

A click on “Next Step” shows:

I’ve opted to run it straight to archives since I’m labeling it as Emergency, so unread items with that label are quite simple to find.  I then also forward it to my phone’s email address — the important part.

Cool, huh?  Anything coming to that address becomes a message on my cell phone.

An alternate email address isn’t necessary either — it could just be done by keywords in the title as well.  “[Emergency]“, for instance, would be easy to filter for as well.

My first go around at this didn’t work out so well.  I was using my phone service’s “short mail” email address. One problem with that method: to read the email I either need to be near a web browser or have a data plan. 

Fortunately, the Wikipedia article on SMS Gateways discusses easy ways to forward emails to SMS.  That works much better! It also give me the message immediately with a bare minimum of button-mashing to read it.

In delightfully retro sort of way, I’m excited about my new alpha-numeric pager. I also have several hundred dollars still in my pocket and my cell plan didn’t need any additional services added.  I call that a win.

3 Responses to “My Cheap Alternative to the BlackBerry”

1. Nikki on September 15th, 2007 3:48 am
   

   Yep… I started doing this a little over a year ago with my Gmail account. Works like a charm. Glad you shared this info.

2. Nikki on September 15th, 2007 3:50 am
   

   Yep… I started doing this a little over a year ago with my Gmail account. Works like a charm. Glad you shared this info.

   – Oh, and I have it for select incoming friends/family emails. Just because Grandma sent me an email doesn’t mean I need to read it right away. Now, if it is, say, my employer’s email addie then, yes, I want to get to it fast!

3. Chris on September 16th, 2007 10:40 am
   

   Thanks Nikki

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