Get email as sms for free

[digg-me]Here is how you can get your Gmail emails as SMS for Free in India. This uses the Google SMS Channel that has been recently introduced and FreeMyFeed service

About FreeMyFeed

Free my feed is a service that allows you to bypass password protected feeds. They say passwords are “never stored on the server,” and discarded immediately after parsing your feed. This is featured in Lifehacker and Google systems. So you might try this risk free.

First step: Getting the feed URL of your inbox

Gmail provides a RSS feed for your inbox which is by default http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

But this requires password authentication. So we use FreeMyFeed to by pass that. Go to FreeMyFeed. Give your feed address ,username and password and submit.

Here the feed URL is http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

They will give a very long URL, some thing like http://freemyfeed.com/feed/asjdasjkdhas232h3… This is the feed URL for our inbox

Second step: Create an SMS channel

In this step we will create an SMS channel for our feed. Goto Google SMS channel and sign in using your Google account. If you are using this for the first time you have to get your mobile verified by getting an SMS with activation code. Once that is done click on try it now section at the right side of it home page to create your own channel.

You will have to fill a long form like the one below now where you have to give the feed URL obtained in the previous step.

You have to be very careful about two things.

1. You have to select RSS/Feed Atom as Source and give the feed URL obtained in the previous step. (Without http:// as that is already given there)

2. Change Allow publishing by to Only me and Who can subscribe to By invitation only. This makes your feed private so that only you can view them.

Almost done , now click create channel.

From now onwards you get an SMS whenever you get an email. However it has two limitations, one that you get only the Subject of the email in  your SMS and that there can be considerable time delay. But for those who don’t check their email every hour this can be  very useful.