Nokia 1110i is super cool when it comes to speed and simplicity. Being a Nokia 1110i user, i’ve always enjoyed the browsing speed and the comfortable keypad. For me, It’s basically a fixed version of Nokia 1100. Even though this black and white phone is stripped to only calling, messaging and with a better version of Snake for entertainment , it doesn’t stop me from receiving my mails and recent feeds on my mobile. The trick is for all who use a simple phone with no GPRS access and is also useful for mobiles with GPRS.

There are two services that i am considering, one being only for phone numbers in India and the other one for USA and Canada.

I will start of with the service for phone numbers in India.

For receiving new mails on SMS, you need to free your Gmail feed from the usual authentication (yes, you have a feed for your email account too).

For regular feeds, apart from Freeing your feed, all the steps to be followed are the same.

Google SMS Channels (Currently for India only):

I have tested this trick only on Gmail accounts and works as smooth as whiskey. It should work for other Webmail services too. Though the updates are not in real time, it usually takes 5-10 minutes to arrive as SMS.

Common Gmail feed link: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

The feeds for other webmail services can be found with Google search.

Get started:

1. Go to https://freemyfeed.com
2. Enter https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom as the input url, followed by your user id and password. (Is it safe? Of course it is. But still, you should read the privacy policy on the website). Save the output URL.
3. Log into Google SMS channels,
4. Settings,
5. Enter your mobile number and set the other options as per your preferences,
6. Create a new channel,
7. Enter the regular details in the form,
8. In the ‘Source’ section, select RSS/Atom feed and enter the new feed generated from http://freemyfeed.com
9. ‘Allow publishing by’: Only me
10. ‘Who can subscribe’: By invitation only
11. Click on Create Channel,
12. And you’re done.

ZapTXT (USA and Canada only):

Register and enter the necessary details and the new feed generated from http://freemyfeed.com

Follow the easy step by step guide, and you’re done!

3 Comments on Receiving Emails And Feeds On SMS For Free

Dwayne from Probably Sucks Blog on Tue, 4th Nov 2008 9:01 am


Out of curiosity, why do you have such an old phone for? Colour screen phones with bluetooth, email, gprs, mms, etc are cheap as now.

Dwayne.
http://probablysucks.com

vishal on Wed, 5th Nov 2008 3:58 pm


Hi
This was really useful article. But it is risk to give user name and password to other sites even though they do not store it.

Raj on Wed, 5th Nov 2008 10:15 pm


To Dwayne:
Actually, i do own a better phone, Nokia N72. But, whenever im bored of using the “techy” phone, i switch back to 1110i and so on.

To Vishal:
It might be a risk. It’s up to the user to risk it up or prefer a paid service. You probably cant trust even the most credible sites of today. A good example is of Google, everybody is aware of their privacy policy.

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