One of the useful things about blackberry devices is their always connected status, I’m told. If you are not so fortunate as to have one there is a couple of ways to work around this in some situations. I don’t have an unlimited data plan for my cell phone. I do have unlimited text and extended text. That’s why I don’t bother with the built in mail clients available to me on my phone already.

My carrier is At&T. I am generally satisfied with how they treat me.

I was wondering how I could improve my ability to answer e-mails in a timely way, without having to sit at my computer waiting sometimes days for a particular e-mail, like an interested party for a sale on Craigslist or eBay.

The answer is actually pretty simple. Most Cell phone services that handle SMS or Texting also have a e-mail to SMS Bridge. Here is a list of the common ones.

Wikipedia has an article on this as well as a list of the common gateways.

So the idea is at your mail server, you set up a forward on that particular account, to your number at the gateway, whenever certain keywords are used, not used, or from certain addresses.

The question then is, “what if you don’t run your own mail server?”
Well Gmail, lets you do the same thing, with pretty much the same capabilities. I’m pretty sure most web based free e-mail services let you do the same thing.

Some people might note this doesn’t seem that groundbreaking. A few friends have mentioned keeping a e-mail client open and running on a computer locally. There are several problems with this:

Setting up a filter at the host or at your own server sends the e-mail, in my experience, to your phone instantly. Then you can go check it on a client if you did not receive it on your phone correctly. At least you have been alerted that you have an e-mail waiting for you.

This puts the work around a little closer to a “push” mail service rather than the traditional ones. With a conventional service you would check the server, download your mail via a client like Eudora, then it’s filters would process it, and forward the e-mail to you. Again It’s probably a good idea to not check your mail via a client more frequently than every 5-10 minutes.

I plan on putting a few more filters in place for various friends as well.

Cell Phones, push mail, sms, sms gateway, txting