I spent the first two weeks in my new apartment without Internet. Thankfully, Gmail has e-mail forwarding which can make your Internet-less days a little less stressful. (Granted, in order to use it you will need to plan ahead and make sure you’re somewhere with Internet for at least five minutes.)

Even if you can’t reply to e-mail messages right away, knowing that someone has replied to your message, that class is canceled, or that something important has happened at work—there are many situations where this can be a useful thing.

Gmail has a feature which allows you to forward incoming e-mails to a given e-mail address. For instance, since I use AT&T, I forward e-mails to <10_digit_phone_number>@txt.att.net. You can find the e-mail address format for your phone by checking the website for your phone’s provider, or checking websites such as makeuseof.com.

Screenshot

However, this feature comes with a disclaimer. If you subscribe to lots of e-mail lists, alerts, etc. you will probably get quite a few oddly formatted, URL-heavy text messages sent to your phone. If you’re like me, and you’re using Gmail’s forwarding feature because you don’t have a data plan, you will need to exercise a bit of caution and make sure not to click the links. Also, if you get a lot of e-mails, you might want to selectively forward the “important” e-mails using Gmail’s built-in filters.

Related posts:

1. A new webcomic: Compulsive Liars Anonymous

This entry was posted Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Sci/Tech, Tips/Tricks. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.