Using SMS for Push Email Notification

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Here’s a quick tip if you want to get push notifications for your email on your phone; use SMS.

I am thinking specifically about Gmail here of course as some services like Yahoo already support push over IMAP. Blackberry’s have RIM’s push technology and I think even Microsoft’s Live supports a form of instant notification.

But that does not work for me. Specifically I want Gmail (on an IPhone) to support push over IMAP but recently when they opened access to push Calendar and Contacts they did not include the feature for email. It’s very likely they will sooner then later but here’s a quick solution that has been working very well for me.

First note that you will probably want unlimited incoming SMS. A standard feature with Rogers in Canada but you situation may vary. The actual setup is extremely simple, head into your  email service settings and forward a copy of all incoming email or a filtered subset of them to your phone’s SMS email address. For Rogers the address is [your-ten-digit-phone-number]@pcs.rogers.com. Check with your carrier for their specific setup.

Once your forward is set, you are essentially done.

When you receive an incoming email, a copy will be sent out to your phone in the form of an SMS. On Rogers you don’t actually receive the email text initially but the notification message does include the senders email address and an option to reply with “Read” to get the actual message over SMS if desired.

I don’t.

I simply start up the mail application on my phone and download the message normally. A secondary tip here is that your email does not have to be checking for new mail at any interval. I set mine for manual checking and save a decent amount of battery life because of it.

In my experience with Rogers the SMS is fast. Usually coming in a second or two before or after the email actually arrives at Gmail. One potential downside is having to delete the SMS notifications from your application. If you receive a large volume of email per day this setup might not be ideal.

I’ve been using this method for about three months and until Google turns on push notification I’ll be sticking with it.

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