Get your emails straight to your phone using FlipMail

Teleflip’s FlipMail service copies email messages from your email inbox and send them directly to your cell phone as a text message. You choose which email message and you may schedule delivery.

October 28, 2007, by itsnearme

Have you ever noticed all those business people walking around typing into their BlackBerry phones feverishly typing emails from anywhere? I always looked at those folks as being lucky, although I never liked BlackBerry devices, they are just too big. So I waited till I got home and logged on to a PC, or if I was bored, I would use my phones web browser to check my emails. Gmail for mobile helps me check my messages, but still would not notify me when I got a new message. This is where FlipMail gathers its power – free, text based email push service. Yes, just like in those expensive BlackBerries device, you can receive a text message containing a preview when you receive a new email message.

I have used FlipMail for several months now and it works great. It lets me stop notifications from specific email addresses, like my friend who sends me 30 FW jokes a day (it got annoying) and of course none of the spam messages. The only messages you receive are from emails in your address book. FlipMail logs into your account every few minutes and sends notifications to your phone. It even lets you decide what time of day you want to turn the service off, I get many messages overnight, and this feature lets me get a full nights sleep without my phone notifying me every hour of my new messages.

Other nice features is the ability to respond to the email through SMS, which makes it like a "virtual" BlackBerry, although its hard to type full emails without a full QWERTY keyboard.

There are only two drawbacks I found with FlipMail. First, it truncates the message because it will not fit into a standard SMS. You can have it send you the full email message but that means 3 or more SMS per email you receive, and that gets annoying. This is not FlipMail’s fault, but more an SMS limitation. The other drawback is that I am only able to check one-email address, such as Hotmail or Gmail, and of course I have 5 I need to check.

  How to use this service

Goto www.teleflip.com, Click on Start Now

1. Enter email address
2. Enter email account password
3. Enter 10 digit cell phone number
4. Once registered you can start receiving emails to your mobile phone!

the text message received will come From: 33715, which is FlipMail's short code.
The text will read Fr: Sender's email, which will be shortened to first few letters of the email. For example, an email from hello232@itsneame.com will show up as Fr: hello232.
The next line will read Subj: which is the subjuect of the email.
Finally, the rest of the text body will include the email body text, up to the limit of an SMS message, which is usually between 120-260 characters.
You are able to reply to the text message, it will be routed to sender of the email.