mail2.im

A few comments after a long hiatus

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:54:35 -0500

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!

Canadian number changed!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:38:17 -0400

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.

Flushed and refreshed

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:40:48 -0400

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!

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:35:27 -0400

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...

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:27:33 -0400

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.

Fixed more weird email errors...

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:48:43 -0400

…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

Another weird bug affecting inbound email fixed...

Sun, 31 May 2009 13:06:32 -0400

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!

Strange days indeed...

Thu, 14 May 2009 05:10:12 -0400

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.

How things are looking these days

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:28:00 -0400

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

Inbound sms fixed!!

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:37:29 -0500

Please advise if you have any problems

Inbound sms to the 416 number is down..

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:14:00 -0500

We moved our servers and for some reason are having technical difficulties here… To be fixed shortly

Problems with your phone?

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:49:58 -0500

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!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:34:36 -0500

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

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:10:48 -0500

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

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:29:50 -0500

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?

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:33:39 -0500

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

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:13:00 -0500

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 - 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.
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.
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.
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...

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:38:40 -0500

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…

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:45:23 -0500

Skype outage fixed as of 2:43pm Eastern. Apologies to all affected…

Quick update

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:42:41 -0500

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