figby.com

I have a system that is supposed to alert me via my mobile phone whenever one of my web servers is overloaded. It tries to give me an early warning when the server is so busy it might crash.

Previously, this never worked, because I used Sprint PCS for mobile service, and their email-to-SMS gateway was so slow that the server would be toast before I ever got the message. More recently, it never worked because I switched to T-Mobile, and my server can’t send email to T-Mobile.

My email is rejected at the SMTP level, regardless of which server I send it from. Apparently they’re using some kind of liberal spam blocking system that believes my server shares a network with spammers, or has tagged my server itself as a spammer due to the high volume of messages trying to alert me about server crashes. Regardless, it doesn’t work, and T-Mobile doesn’t offer me any control over how much spam filtering is applied to my email-to-phone account.

Fortunately, I found a solution: Teleflip is a free gateway service to send SMS messages to phones. The cool thing is that you can send email to number@teleflip.com and it will simply work, regardless of the mobile carrier. The other cool thing is that the messages get through to T-Mobile… at least until they decide to block it.