vgsmail: News and Updates

I have just checked in a very first step towards mail notification by SMS. It's rather experimental, so use at your own risk... Currently, only IMAP server support is available, although I'll be including POP and Hotmail support very soon. The system works by logging into your mail server at regular intervals (called the 'check frequency' on the setup page) and looks for any new mail in your inbox. If that mail is still 'unread' after a predefined time ('page threshold') a message will be sent to your mobile telling you that you have new mail. The clever part is that if you are sitting in front of your computer (and therefore read the new mail as it arrives) you will not be paged!
I'd just like to make it clear that all information stored on my system is confidential. I only allow ssh access and am the only person with such access. The only case in which I will divulge information to any 3rd parties is as required to do so by UK law.

I've been asked a few times now (FAQ is being written) how to create a largish list of recipients (such as all your friends). At the moment I don't have any internal support for lists, but IMHO a better solution is to use the email-to-SMS capabilities. Just create a mailing list in Outlook or Pine or whatever you use for your email with each of the recipients of your SMS list in the format 07971123456@sms.vgsmail.com or youralias@alias.vgsmail.com. For instance, create a mailing list called family which might contain dad@alias.vgsmail.com, mum@alias.vgsmail.com and dog@alias.vgsmail.com. You'll need to authenticate the message by either putting your userid and password on the subject line, or enabling from-line authentication (account setup).

With the overwhelming demand since my posts on uk.telecom.mobile, I've been forced to reduce the 'free credit' to GBP0.50 otherwise I'm just not going to be able to make things add up. I'll see how things go at this rate for a while and if the numbers add up I'll give all beta-tests a freebie.

22:27: Full service has been restored. For those interested, it turned out that the power supply on the mobile attached to my server had failed. It probably failed a few days ago and the phone ran on batteries for a while. I've replaced the power supply. In the short term, there isn't a lot I can do to avoid this particular problem, although had it happened any other day of the week I would have been able to resolve it as soon as I discovered the problem. In the long term, I intend on getting an internal GSM modem.
Outage: The SMS-to-email service is currently 'down' apparently due to a hardware failure. I can't access the hardware from my current location and so I don't have any idea how serious this is, but the service will definitely not be restored until this evening. The outage ONLY AFFECTS:
SMS-to-email;
System status indicator (which will, correctly, indicate 'down').
All other services are currently working correctly: web-to-SMS, wap-to-SMS, java midlet SMS sending and email-to-SMS. My apologies for the down-time.