PingMe and T-Mobile - Enabling E-mail to SMS

2008-09-04 20:00:00 -0400

We’ve received reports from some of our PingMe users who are also T-mobile customers that they’ve had difficulty receiving messages from PingMe on their T-mobile phone. Since none of us here at Zetetic is a T-Mobile customer there isn’t much more we can do beyond making sure that the outbound messages are actually being sent.

However, we have word from PingMe user Charles Eubanks that there is an account setting one must tweak in order to allow e-mail messages to be sent directly to your T-Mobile phone as SMS. We haven’t been able to verify this ourselves, but we’ve received a great walk-through description from Charles.

Just a quick explanation: PingMe uses your mobile provider’s e-mail-to-text gateway to send text messages to your mobile device. Not all carriers provide this option, some of them require you to enable or activate it, and some of the more nefarious ones will even charge you extra. However, for most folks it just works and it doesn’t cost any extra (beyond whatever you already pay to receive SMS messages).

That being said, this is the process for allowing email messages to be sent to your T-Mobile handset:

1. Go to the T-Mobile website and login (or register if you haven’t yet).
2. When the page loads, hover the pointer over the “My account” tab. One of the options will be “Send a text message.” Click on that.
3. On the right side of the resulting page is a box with the heading “Resources.” One of the options in that list is “Create e-mail filters.” Click on that.
4. On that page, there is an option labeled “Block all messages from E-Mail to handset.” Set this to “No.”

Once you’ve gotten that taken care of, you can create a new Mobile target in PingMe for your phone and start receiving and updating your reminders via text!

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