I thought of this idea a few days ago and it realy got me excited. The basic thought is that a daemon checks your email and when you have a new one he dispatches and SMS to you with the sender and the subject of the message. This way you can chill out anywhere and when you get an email you were waiting for run to a computer! Nice, neat and easy. I got to it and in less than four hours i had a nice little PHP app doing just this. Here is the way i did it…

First of all i used my knowledge on the POP protocol, described on a previous article here. Second ingredient for the app is the http api protocol for sending SMS via the Clickatell gateway. It is not an obligation to do it with this gateway i just used this one cause i used it before and i know my way around. The basic idea behind this application is this. First of all you create a script that can connect to a pop server and retreive messages. Secondly, you run a cronjob hitting this script every X minutes (i put it on 10). The script then sees if there is a new message on the server. If there is one, it retreives it, get’s the sender and the subject and then, using the api for sending SMS it sends one to you. Simple huh? Well the service is very usefull.

Implementing it i found it usefull to add some rules over the messages to alert me. I mean what is the use to be alerted for a montlhy newsletter? Or, even, if you are expecting a specific e-mail and want to be notified only for that or for the specific sender. For this what i did is, on the email account you set it up to be a deny all or allow all. On a deny all account, you will be notified for no message except the ones you explicitly say you want. On an allow all you will be notified for all emails except the ones you explicitly say you don’t want to.

I decided not to release the script for public usage, at least not for now. If it sounds nice to you and you want it, then just leave a comment or mail me and i’ll be happy to send it to you and even help you set it up.