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…