mail2.im is still up, running, and approaching thirty thousand messages relayed in the year its been up. Not bad, not bad…. Still a few snags occasionally but mostly we seem to be working.
I’ve noticed the following things:
- Our yahoo IM stuff is simply broken. We connect through Bitlbee, and I think Bitlbee didn’t have Yahoo’s latest protocol changes. I’d like to use something like Openfire instead when I get to it, hence the delay in fixing this.
- The IM clients do bounce a little bit. Again, I think this is a bitlbee <-> mail2im thing, and will fix with the next upgrade.
- The twitter stuff still seems to confuse people. Mail2im follows you, THEN you follow mail2im (or vice versa), THEN the messages can get relayed to twitter as a direct message. This isn’t a mail2im thing - this is a Twitter thing. You cannot send direct messages to people who don’t follow you. PLEASE follow mail2im on Twitter if you want to get direct messages from mail2im.
- Occasionally we break decoding an email, but I haven’t seen that for some time now. If you notice something here, let me know.
Last night, for the first time in a year, the server actually crashed (or was restarted by the hosting people?) so I needed to do a complete restart. Miraculously, this seemed to harm little and seems to be working. I’ll keep monitoring to see if we’re staying up and not broken for some nefarious reason.
Thanks for using the product!
1 month ago
The new number is +1-905-407-0388 so forget that old 416 number.
We’re fixing up a few things on the international number for customers outside Canada and the US, so for the next few days you’ll find that number is not working. We should be back up shortly however and I’ll post here to let all know.
5 months ago
today… Restarted all the IM servers and Skype etc etc. If you’ve found some of your IMs (or efforts to create an IM id) were sticking, you should find now that they’re working again… It seems my IM bridges slowly get sick over time, so if I forget to restart for too many days in a row, things can get a little gummed up.
Hope all working for you now!
7 months ago
We fixed the mail2.im problem with the Canadian phone numbers, so we’re back in good shape in that regard. Also the problem of deleting a number and adding it again with a new carrier only hits on the US number, so no worries for those using Canada (or, I think, UK).
8 months ago
I finally bought myself an iphone and switched networks today. In doing so I found a couple of problems
1) There was an extra field on the “add your phone number” page. Sorry! Gone now, and apologies for any confusion
2) Ooooops we didn’t format correctly to send to Verizon. I think it works now, but if someone can tell me it works for them it would be great
3) The Canadian SMS number is hanging at the moment. This causes about a sixty second delay then failure. We’ll fix this over this weekend.
4) I found a few really weird things when I switched my number. I went from Helio to AT&T and basically deleted my mail2.im number then added it again to set up the new carrier. First, AT&T didn’t enable email to sms on the new account for about eight hours! If you have a new carrier, you might find you are not getting the confirmation message. The second (worse) part is that, for those using the US number at least, you get a confirmation message with wrong instructions. It tells you to text back something, and that something doesn’t work, and you’ll find your phone number is still not set up. I’ll get to fixing this shortly, but until then, if anyone has this problem, just let me know, and I’ll fix it manually.
Gradually grinding out the gremlins here. I hope you are continuing to enjoy the service.
8 months ago
…driving me crazy!
Anyway finally I put in whats most likely a better fix. Again for the technically minded: ANY bad iconv value got the email decoder stuck. So, like I most likely should’ve done in the first place, I check every value against all possible valid values first. Who’d’ve thunk iconv would basically hang on a bad value?
Ok - who’d’ve thought it would take me forever to put in a proper fix. Sorry
Hope all your emails are properly relaying now, and apologies for the continued glitches
9 months ago
A few users had their inbound emails get “stuck” again. For the technically minded: it seems iconv hung converting iso8859-1 to utf-8… If that encoding wasn’t explicitly specified, no conversion was done, so it didn’t hang. Since its the default encoding, its not usually specified. Anyway, a gruesome patch hacked in should get rid of some of the intermittent glitches some of you have been experiencing.
Hope you continue to enjoy!
9 months ago
We’ve been mostly stable for some time now as far as forwarding messages goes, but for some reason (thanks to a particular user for pointing this out!) we got stuck yesterday for certain email messages. That is - if you sent a email to someperson@mail2.im, it didn’t forward. If you sent an email to anotherperson@mail2.im, it did. It also seemed to forward correctly if you sent via IM or SMS.
The good news is it appears to be back working again. The bad news is I don’t yet know exactly why we had this glitch, and a few of you may have experienced annoying delays in message delivery or even had a message or two go awry.
I’ll keep working on this. If you get a lot of messages at once, one message twice, or a message from a few days ago suddenly delivered, this is why.
10 months ago
Sorry its been a while since I’ve posted. It appears mail2im is basically stable now in terms of message routing, though every once in a while a weird email chokes it. The IM connections tend to decay if I don’t restart once every couple of weeks - the next release (coming one day…) will solve that from what I can tell so far. So it seems
- Adding IM and twitter accounts sticks sometimes. From what I can tell, the main IM one that sticks is Yahoo, and the main problem with twitter is if you don’t accept mail2-im as a follower, it will eventually give up and stop trying to send you a direct message.
- Some of the email to sms gateways I’m using for “supported carriers” still aren’t quite right. If you’ve tried to add a phone on a supported gateway and didn’t get a confirmation message, please let me know either here or at via email
- I realize the web site usable is (ahem) a little rough, but coming soon.
Oh - I should have also added: there is now a UK number you can reply to if thats better for you than the US or Canadian numbers. The UI doesn’t fully reflect this yet, but should you want to reply to messages via SMS, you can now text back to +44-7781-482-769. We’ve been testing this number for about a month now and it does seem to be mostly reliable.
Anything else you’ve noticed (good or back) would be great to get feedback on. Hope you are otherwise finding the product useful
11 months ago
