Dave Hoff, one of the co-founders of imified, kindly let me know about one of their newest features (released last night).

If you add your mobile phone number to imified’s account settings, and then set reminders through imified’s reminder service as per normal, and sign out of your jabber/IM account (during the little time you are offline!), imified will send your reminder by SMS to your mobile phone instead, or a reminder by email.

Not only is this feature free, but it will only work if your jabber client is offline, thus avoiding duplication of reminders and cluttering up your phone with uneeded SMS messages. You also have the option to select whether you are notified via email address instead/as well.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work quite as prescribed in the UK (no fault of imified - just the restrictive british telcos).
My phone provider, Orange, having started out with a basic ability to receive emails as SMS messages, now only allow users to receive Orange alerts, which just put the subject header of the email in the text message. As Imified reminders have a subject line of “Imified Reminder”, receiving this text is not that helpful. What would be better would be “Imified reminder - buy beer”, with more reminder info included. All the other UK networks charge for receiving email alerts (if they even provide such services).

Not only that but Orange also do not allow you to sign up with a numeric email address, so you cannot use the alert by phone service as prescribed, just the “to email” option. An alternative would be to use some kind of email-to-SMS alert system, and set offline reminders to just go to an email address. Yahoo offer one, but you need a Yahoo email address, and they charge the earth for it.

AFAIK, there are no free reliable Email to SMS gateways for UK users (although for worldwide users there might be some).

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