email forwarding to text message with character limit

July 17, 2007 4:54 PM

so, i have a Gmail account, and have a filter that forwards specific emails to my phone via text message ([e-mail]). Only problem is, character limit! Is there some service that I can forward these emails to that will then split them up into text-message-sized bits to be forwarded to my phone?
posted by Gregamell to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I use mail2sms to do this, but I get mail on a Unix box which can filter things through procmail.
posted by jaimev at 5:18 PM on July 17, 2007

TeleFlip is what you want.
posted by superfem at 5:39 PM on July 17, 2007

Thats odd. I do the same thing and mine arrive fine as Huge text messages with an "attachment" called file.txt that I can read on my phone.

No idea what the key component is. I am Fwding with Gmail to my T-Mobile Razr phone.
posted by vacapinta at 5:55 PM on July 17, 2007

If you have picture messaging service, you may be able to send the texts as picture messages instead of text, and there's a much higher character limit.

I think the limit is 525 or so. I just sent 435 characters to my phone and it worked fine - all in the same message.

Be warned that, depending on your carrier, picture messages may be priced differently than text, so make sure your text package covers pix as well.
posted by altcountryman at 6:06 PM on July 17, 2007

Is a device like a blackberry or such out of the question? It sounds somewhat suboptimal attempting to read your email in sms format.
posted by oxford blue at 10:01 PM on July 17, 2007

See if your email->phone service has some way to make emails sent "as MMS instead of SMS". (The first S in SMS is "short" -- AFAIK, it's a hack atop GSM, like traceroute atop ICMP/IP).

In SMS, there's only enough space for 140 8-bit characters or 160 7-bit characters. If you change to MMS, it wil (AFAIK) break it into packets and deliver any(?) size. Beware that some carriers charge much more for MMS than SMS.
posted by cmiller at 8:21 AM on July 18, 2007