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.

1. First, go to the mail2.im home page and sign up for mail2.im (of course).  You should get a confirmation email.  Be sure to check your spam folder, and give it a few minutes in case the various daemons of email delayed it for whatever reason.
2. When you get the signup email, click on the link.  This will validate your signup and send you to a page for managing your account.  Bookmark this page as its the place where you can add and subtract all the places you want mail2.im to send your mail to.
3. To add an instant messaging account, click “ADD” on the account page and then select the type of account it is (for example, Skype).  mail2.im will send a buddy request to that account, so make sure you are not blocking buddy requests from strangers at least during the signup process.  When you get the buddy request, you’ll get a message with a link on it.  Click on the link, and you’ll have an instant messaging account connected to your mail2.im account.
4. To add a new mobile phone account, click on “ADD” and select mobile phone.  You’ll then go through a few steps where we try and find out if we can directly support your network and send you the message for free.  When you’re finished, you’ll get a message or two to your phone that you need to reply to to complete validating your phone number.
5. Now you can put your new mail2.im id into twitter as the email id you’d like to be notified at.  So, for example, if you signed up as “bob”, you can go to your twitter settings, click on the account tab, and change your email to “bob@mail2.im”.   

When you’ve finished, you’ll find that whenever twitter notifies you, it goes to mail2.im, and mail2.im sends the notification to you as an instant message (if you added instant messaging and you’re on line) or as a text message (if you’re not on line).   If you added multiple mobile phones, it will send to the last one you used with mail2.im.

Note that you don’t actually need to connect mail2.im directly to your twitter account if you just want to get messages from twitter to mail2.im.

If you want messages to mail2.im to be sent onward to twitter as direct messages, you can do that too, but I’ll write a bit more about that on another post.