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Comment by belden | Hacker News Reader

Oh, yikes. I’ve come to rely on the email->sms gateway from AT&T. I’ve had they set up a s a forwarding address within my web mail for a few years now, and have filters which forward matching messages as SMS to my phone.

The formatting is often quite lousy but it’s enough to send me a nudge to check my email for a message from the library, a job I applied for, or whatever.

I wouldn’t have heard about this about it being posted here, so thank you!

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Why not just have notifications only for that filter? I get not checking emails, I get so many that anything important is just ignored along with all of the other crap but if you already have a good filter, just use that.

I suppose I hadn’t discovered that! I set this up back in 2002, well before the iPhone and push notifications.

It’s worked for decades, and I haven’t needed to look for a different solution until now.

Thanks for the tip!

This is the weirdest notification workflow I have ever heard of.

Right? The "notify me when this specific email comes in" problem has been well solved but on the other hand: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Really? You think "relay certain emails to my phone" is on par with that?

Oh I’ve gotten weird about email, for sure — but this is more of an example of “the prototype goes to production”.

I put these filters in place long before iPhones were a thing, and when the only devices that supported push notifications were BlackBerry (maybe? I didn’t have one) and pagers.

In the early 2000s if I wanted to be notified to go home and check my email for something important, the email->sms gateway was really my only option.

It’s probably worth a revisit now though!

Email is a standard protocol and nobody owns it. Text messages have the carriers as gatekeepers and they want to get paid.

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