Comments on: MSN-to-email-to-SMS?

Question: MSN-to-email-to-SMS?

krisjohn — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:31:58 -0800

Anyone know any free solution for forwarding MSN messages to an email address?

I have a PC at work that's always on, a friend in a different timezone and an email-to-SMS gateway. Anyone know if there's a program or plug-in that will glue all this together?

By: devilsbrigade

devilsbrigade — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:39:27 -0800

MSN already has send-to-mobile... can't you just tell the friend to use that?

Otherwise, I'd use a perl MSN library to make a little daemon to run while you're not at the computer. Net-Msmgr was the first I found on Google. If possible, I'd probably try to find something using POE instead. It should be trivial to hook the receive-message event up to a sub that would send an email.

By: aeighty

aeighty — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:44:24 -0800

centericq has event hooks for tying scripts to events (ie: incoming message).

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:16:23 -0800

Sorry, I should have said; I'm in Australia and all the SMS sending features of all IM services are not available.

By: randomstriker

randomstriker — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:18:18 -0800

trillian pro isn't free but it definitely has a plug-in that will accomplish exactly what you want.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:36:53 -0800

centericq looks damn interesting, particularly since I love CLI stuff, but the screen doesn't update properly on the PC in question (a Win2k3 box). :(

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:47:33 -0800

No, wait, fixed the screen. Now it just won't connect to MSN.

By: Dunwitty

Dunwitty — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:57:45 -0800

Are you trying to forward MSN Messenger messages to email/SMS? Your post is unclear.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Wed, 24 May 2006 19:15:39 -0800

Yes. My friend typically pops onto MSN after 9pm my local time. By that time I tend not to have a PC on at home. (Also, she's the only friend that uses MSN, all my other MSN contacts are work-related and I don't want to be bothered by work at home.) What I want to be able to do is leave myself logged in at work and when she sends me a message, get a message emailed to my email-to-SMS gateway so that something pops up on my phone. At which point I can send an SMS saying hello.

Don't ask me why she won't just send an SMS, I don't know.

BTW: centericq appears to have severe MSN problems, and it looks like the Win32 compile does not have an available fix. :(

By: Sharcho

Sharcho — Thu, 25 May 2006 08:41:45 -0800

Not answering your question, but the new beta version of Skype allows sending SMS messages all over the world.

By: Jhaus

Jhaus — Thu, 25 May 2006 20:04:55 -0800

Have you tried this: http://alerts.msn.com?

I think that if she would just send you an email (an option in MSN Messenger) this service will send you an SMS independent of IM.

Hopefully she will be a little flexible.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Fri, 26 May 2006 16:47:06 -0800

I like the promise of Skype, certainly more than paying 25 cents per SMS I receive via an email gateway, but I'm just testing it now (with the authorisation code) and it's been at least 20 minutes since I requested the SMS. There was some US-based phonecam pic to Flickr that seemed to have the same problem. I'm guessing the message might arrive some time this weekend. :(

And yes, I'd like her to email too, but she seems to only want to use an IM service that doesn't have the option of sending when the recipient isn't online.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Fri, 26 May 2006 17:14:19 -0800

Ah.

"To start sending SMS from Skype, you need Skype Credit."

By: Sharcho

Sharcho — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:49:32 -0800

Here are the Skype SMS rates, which are pretty cheap, but it's not free, and you do have to prepay the credit.