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Comment by nppc | Hacker News Reader

Nostolgia ... I remember those days.

Developers try so hard these days to implement push notifications from their apps & services and boast about all the IFTTT stuff.

Carries here in India used to provide email-to-sms as a free service. You would just send an email to +91PhoneNo@xyzprovider.com and that message would be sent to PhoneNo as an SMS (160 chars from subject).

Now a days if you want to send a message, you need to have developer accounts, install Software on the devices to receive the notifications, need to have a data connection on the phone, talk to push notifications clouds and a few other things.

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The email-to-SMS trick makes me feel very nostalgic. I still think that was the most brilliant idea for mobile notifications in those days.

Sometime in 2007, I setup a forwarding rule in my GMail account for my long-distance friend's address. When she mailed, I would get it as an SMS on phone and run back home to chat if I was out.

It stopped working after sometime. I'm not sure what happened. I remember reading it was made an enterprise-only service by some telecom operators. If they the service back up and running, I'm sure there are many ideas waiting to be built on top of it.

TMobile still has this service, I use it to send messages to the wife if I forget my phone.

At least in the US, you can still do the email-to-sms trick. In fact, I think that's exactly why so many sites ask who your carrier is (so they know which domain to use). Sending raw SMS, your carrier shouldn't matter.

http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB63037&cv=820#f...

http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-3309

http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/06/computer...

The predecessor to Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync used this method. It was called AUTD (Always Up To Date) and sent SMS messages either via an SMSMC or through email-to-SMS originating on the Exchange server. What was "fun," as a support engineer in PSS back then, was helping people diagnose and clear out mobile phone numbers that users had set up and then had one of three things happen: sailed way past their in-built SMS allotment, didn't realize that receiving SMS cost money and receiving huge bills, or swapping to another phone without an Exchange client to intercept the SMS and being bombarded with SMS notifications.

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