Subscribe Today!
Networked Blogs
Jul
13
GMail SMS Text Alerts
Filed Under cell phones, email, Google
UPDATE: GMail has reformated its messages to solve this problem!
I’ve been wanting to figure out how to set up a way to have GMail send a SMS text alert to a cell phone, but have not been able to figure out a way to do it easily.
GMail allows email forwarding to be set as a rule. That’s a good thing and would seem to be the solution. However, the confirmation message that is sent via SMS to a cell phone is too long to confirm the setting.
The other solution would be to forward the email to another email provider that can send an alert via SMS to the phone. Way back when, I used Yahoo and Hotmail to alert my old-fashioned cell phone regarding emails. That was before I started using GMail and was spoiled by their service. It wouldn’t be too difficult to set up a forwarding rule and send certain emails to Yahoo to be forwarded to my cell phone as an alert. But, it means additional steps, possible delays, and other hassles associated with having additional email accounts.
The other (expensive with some cellular carriers) is to subscribe to a data plan and check GMail from the phone. I have the program to do that with my current phone and have an offer to upgrade for free from my carrier to a better phone that can easily do that. However, I’m cost conscious and would rather not shell out a ton of money for the data plan.
It’d be nice to be able to do it without a lot of email forwarding or the need to shell out the additional expense to purchase a data plan for occasional alerts regarding specific emails.
Comments
4 Responses to “GMail SMS Text Alerts”
what cell phone service do you use?
Are you saying it sends a sms with the full email in it and therefore you dont receive it or too bothersome?
Hi Joe,
Verizon’s my cell phone carrier. I have a Palm Centro, but don’t have a data plan because I can sync my calendar, etc. via cable.
The last time I tried to set up GMail forwarding to my phone, it sent a confirmation email to my phone’s email account (which is SMS) that was more the 160 characters, so whatever instructions there were to confirm the forwarding email address were cutoff and not displayed.
I could do the GMail -> Yahoo -> my phone’s email address and that would work. But, it would be nicer to have some sort of direct way to shoot out an alert that says a certain email has been received in the account.
I just set this up. The confirmation code is an 8 digit number in the subject line of the email sent to my phone. Even though it was cut off I was still able to type in that number to verify.
I just set up an alert and the confirmation message included the necessary number right at the front of the message so that it can be read as a cell phone text message. The message sent via GMail (using Google Apps for Domains) read as follows: (************.com Forwarding Confirmation (#1234567) – Receive Mail from *******@**********.com) *******@**********.com has reque…
I haven’t tried it using regular GMail, but I assume the confirmation message is the same.