January 2010
1 post
A few comments after a long hiatus
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...
September 2009
1 post
Canadian number changed!
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.
July 2009
3 posts
Flushed and refreshed
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!
Canadian number back up!
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).
glitches again...
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...
June 2009
1 post
Fixed more weird email errors...
…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...
May 2009
2 posts
Another weird bug affecting inbound email fixed...
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...
Strange days indeed...
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...
April 2009
1 post
How things are looking these days
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...
March 2009
2 posts
Inbound sms fixed!!
Please advise if you have any problems
Inbound sms to the 416 number is down..
We moved our servers and for some reason are having technical difficulties here… To be fixed shortly
February 2009
11 posts
Problems with your phone?
I’ve noticed that some of our “supported” carriers have troubled some users. If you added your mobile phone, and did NOT get a validation message, please contact me here. Let me know your number and your carrier. Hopefully we can then get it sorted out so you get your free sms messages from mail2.im!
Comments!
Yes I finally joined 2009 and enabled comments on this blog. Soon I will say a large number of great things, thus undoubtedly creating a veritable firestorm of feedback.
Bedeviled by circularity
Found a few more crazy ways to accidentally go in a circle and think I captured them. If you’re mad and malevolent, I’m sure you can still catch me out here :)
Also cleaned up the reforming of inbound emails. I try and turn them into nice clean text then chop them to 250 characters so fit nicely into a couple of texts or IMs. A few of you had some really ugly ones this week that...
A few small improvements
Snuck in a few improvements in the last day or so. I noticed some circular emails going around and so tried to improve catching those. Also should find that emails are cleaned up more nicely if they originally arrived as html.
For those who haven’t hit these problems: I don’t want to tempt fate by claiming perfection, but things keep getting cleaner.
Thanks all for your help and...
Is it always free?
Wow I’ve had an amazing couple of days (and couple of glitches…) since our post went up on simplespark. Thanks! I’m still a little behind in getting back to everyone with their questions/comments/queries, but let me start with one question I’ve seen floating around:
Is it always free?
The short answer is “Yes, except…”. If there is any possible...
living the mail2.im lifestyle
Yes living the mail2.im lifestyle is the ambition of many, but not known to all. Here’s what I personally do with mail2.im. Since I personally wrote it :), I’m highly convinced of its suitability for these tasks:
Chat with my friends in foreign countries. A round trip text message to the UK can cost $1.00. With mail2.im, I can send to my girlfriend using email, IM, sms -...
Updated the instructions: when adding an IM id, you need to accept mail2im’s buddy request to activate the id.
Skype outage fixed as of 2:43pm Eastern. Apologies to all affected…
Quick update
We had a bit of an outage today from about noon until 3pm Eastern. Our Skype connection appears to have gone bananas, and it took a little while to “un-bananas” it. Please accept my apologies if you had a problem as a result
mail2im, twitter, and you
mail2.im works well as a simple message relay for twitter users. If you’d like some of your twitter notifications to reach you on instant messenging when you’re on line, and via text messaging to one or more of your mobile phones when you’re not, its quite easy to set up with mail2.im.
First, go to the mail2.im home page and sign up for mail2.im (of course). You should get a...
Progress so far!
Hey thanks to all those who’ve been experimenting with mail2.im in the last few weeks. It seems like the “relaying messages” part basically works, but a few people hit some glitches. I of course think I fixed them, but please say something if its not working for you. Sending to “bug” at mail2.im will work, or hit the contact me link at the bottom of the mail2.im...
January 2009
2 posts
launch day!
We’re launching mail2.im today!
This means you can sign up and get your messages to follow you - from email to instant messenger, to different phones when you’re offline! You can even reply to emails from your phones or IM.
Obviously we think it all works (or we wouldn’t have launched it) but no doubt a few gremlins crept in there. If you hit a problem, we’d be happy...
mail2.im almost ready to launch!
December 2008
6 posts
puttering and patching
…on the “alpha of the alpha” (alpha squared?). I think I fixed up a few annoyances, including a tendency to get only pieces of messages at times. Now instead of just relaying the first line, I cleaned up the mime stuff and try and relay something a little more helpful.
Hopefully this won’t break too many times!
its aliiiiive!
The alpha of the alpha (or whatever) is alive! Yep there’s some bailing wire… In fact, maybe there isn’t a lot that isn’t bailing wire. But I think it works… mostly
Going with the flow
Thanks to this awesome post, I appear to have a hope of making my self imposed deadline. Good thing advanced technology to make things easy is so complicated!
Our evil plan advances
We actually appear to link to the blog now! Of course the style sheets don’t look the same, but there ya go. Can’t have everything.
wobbling forwards
well mail2.im is wobbling forward! We still don’t actually link to the blog, but we do occasionally manage to sign people up and relay their mail. Of course we promptly break at unpredictable intervals, but hey the value prop is arriving!
mail2.im's first wobbly steps
Yes these are our first wobbly steps folks. I know they seem like nothing now, but the time will come when you’ll be proud to remember “Yes, those were their first wobbly steps”