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

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 gave me good examples to clean up. Let me know if this is working for you by contacting me here

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 support!

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 way for us to get you a message for free, the service is free.  This means: we can email you, we can twitter you, we can instant message you - all for free.    This means: there are a set of carriers that support “email to sms gateways”, and, on those carriers, we can text message you for free.

What it doesn’t mean:  we don’t pay for whatever charges you incur with your carrier for text or data usage.  So, mail2.im is “free” in those cases, but you might be paying someone else for the data or text message charges.  We’ve tried to arrange it so you can always interact with mail2.im in multiple ways, and pick the one thats cheapest for you, but I don’t know which ways those will be.  You need to check your carrier agreements.

What it also doesn’t mean: there are a bunch of other carriers that don’t give us any access via “email to sms gateways”.  We think we have the right list, but, hey, if you see any carriers missing, let me know here we’ll add them.

If your carrier is not in the list, and you want to use text messaging to receive messages from mail2.im, we give you the option of still connecting your mobile phone number to mail2.im, but we have to charge you to cover the cost of the text message.

I agree this is sort of a downer. It would be nice if we could always get the text message to you for free.  But, if you’ve got a carrier thats not in our list, you at least can decide you’d still like to get messages there and add your phone number as “unsupported”.   We use Amazon Payments to allow you to put a few dollars into your mail2.im “wallet”, and then every time we send you a text message that costs money, we decrement the wallet by $0.10.  It works basically like a prepaid mobile phone: you can buy $1.00, $5.00, $10.00 or $25.00 worth of credits and then top up later when you need more.  If you ever run out of credits, we’ll forward your message onward to the next place we can and note that you need to get more credits.  For example, you might get the message sent onward to your email instead of to your mobile phone, with a note that you’re out of phone credits.

I hope you’ll find this a reasonable solution.   If you want to be sure that you never pay anything to mail2.im, then don’t add an unsupported phone.  We don’t auto-reload your wallet either, so you’ll never accidentally pay more.  If you’re using mail2.im to send messages between different countries, you’ll probably find that the $0.10 we charge for you to receive a text message on an unsupported carrier is cheaper than paying the full price of an international text message, but, its up to you how you want to get your messages.

In other words: mail2.im is always free, except when you’ve asked us to connect a phone that we cannot send to for free.

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:

1. 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 - whatever is most convenient at the time.  She’ll get the message as an SMS if she’s offline, but she’ll probably reply using email.   Total cost: $0.10 to receive in the UK on an unsupported career - and $0 on a supported carrier.  And if she were online, it would go to her Skype account (for example) instead and cost nothing.
2. Get alerts. I’d rather get Twitter direct messages and Google calendar notifications to my computer than my phone - if I’m in front of my computer.   So I use my mail2.im email address for notifications, and mail2.im sends the messages to Skype if I’m online and SMS if I’m not.
3. Stay in touch while traveling. I switch phone numbers while traveling (‘cause I’m cheap), but this is a pain for staying in touch.  With mail2.im, you can have as many phone numbers (and every other kind of id) as you like, and the message will go to the last number you used.  So, when I land in Heathrow, I text, using mail2.im, that I’ve arrived, and from that point on my mail2.im messages will go to my UK phone instead of my US phone.
4. Beat high telecoms costs. This is sort of the same as #1 and #3, but perhaps more broad.  Sometimes its cheaper to email, and sometimes its cheaper to SMS.  It depends what your carrier plan is like, and it really depends whether or not and where you are roaming.  With mail2.im, you can send email from SMS (or IM or anything else for that matter), and, by sending to other mail2.im users, you can effectively send text from email.  This means you can always pick the cheapest, and most convenient (and most battery saving, and.. and… and..) way to keep in touch.

The steps on how to do this are pretty simple: add your various accounts (be sure to accept the buddy requests from mail2.im for your Twitter, Skype and other IM accounts or they won’t get added), then tell people who need to send you short text messages to send to your mail2.im email account instead of your phone.

To send an email to people from anywhere, just use their email id where you would have put their mail2.im id at the beginning of your reply.

Thats the whole story…

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