E-mail to Telephone Service or Program?

April 13, 2006 7:30 AM

E-mail to Telephone Service or Program?

I am looking for a program or service that will do either one of the two following options:

1. An e-mail with a specific subject line comes in to my computer running Outlook. A local program then dials out (through the modem) and plays a short recorded message to the person who answers the phone.

2. An e-mail with a specific subject line comes in to my computer running Outlook. Using filters and rules, Outlook forwards that e-mail to a service somewhere. That service then calls a number and plays a recorded message to the person who answers the phone.

The number dialed would always be the same. Does anyone have any ideas for this? I've tried to search, but been unsuccessful.

Thanks!

Richard

posted by richardhay to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

With some programming and hardware, you could easily make asterisk do that... Not that I'm advocating you have to program it, but if you find nobody offers such a service or makes such a program, well, maybe you've found a small niche market to conquer? :)
posted by shepd at 7:42 AM on April 13, 2006

Response by poster: Mentioning Asterisk does bring up one additional point. I could, if need be, devote a small linux box to this task, but I would rather do it directly from my Windows Outlook box.

Thanks, Shepd, for the suggestion of Asterisk. I'd rather not have to move to that full-featured of a program for this simple (?) task, but will if need be.
posted by richardhay at 7:46 AM on April 13, 2006

Probably a useful question is to ask why you want to actually ring a number and play a voice message.

At work, we've put some monitoring in place which, when something falls over, emails some of our techies. If that doesn't have any effect, it sends them a text message direct to their mobile phones; and if that doesn't fix anything, texts their boss!

This is much easier to achieve: is that a possible workaround for what you're thinking of doing?
posted by jamescridland at 2:24 AM on April 15, 2006