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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Nice story, and great that Twilio worked out for you - but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup - and twilio is an interesting hack around that.

But there really should be an easy way to make just as much ruckus from a simple email, based on topic/sender filtering... (hm, maybe there's a nice side project for an app in there...).

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The post you replied to barely even mentioned Twilio. It made no comparison to email or IM. It never said those wouldn't have worked. You seem to imply that choosing to use Twilio at all indicates a fault in one's communication setup...because they should use email instead?

The funny thing is, you go on to acknowledge that a phone call is psychologically more urgent than an email, and ponder how email might be extended to cover that use case...or maybe, the person was not at fault and was actually using the right tool for the job!

If you treat emails with the same urgency you give phone calls, I would argue there's a fault in your phone/communication set up. For most people I know, email can wait an hour or two, or even overnight. Phone calls require you to choose to ignore them.

Maybe in your world that works.

Until the FCC develops redevelops any sort of interest in dealing with scammers, my phone is basically useless for most of the world to speak to me.

If you're trying to reach me and are not on my list of approved callers, you can email me, or decide you didn't actually want to talk to me. (No, I don't use FB Messenger or related spyware, either.)

On the other hand, I apparently pay much more attention to email than you - I generally respond within about five minutes, assuming there's some reason.

One of the points of email is that it is asynchronous communication. You can even respond in batches like RMS does. While everyone's email workflow is different, it would be a mistake to assume that email was ever designed to be used as an instant-messaging-style communication tool.

IRC exists for a reason.

Yeah, this isn't really a major Twilio win or a hack - it's a basic scraping technique.

I found a house for myself and a friend in a similar way, reverse engineer mobile app from MLS, scrape all listings once a day to get new stuff as it hits the market and you can now be far more selective than the crappy search on the MLS site allows.

Yeah you can sends texts to your phone just like sending an email.

How to do that?

Put the phone number in front of a domain for each carrier, a list is here.

https://github.com/WilliamFCipriano/FreeSMS/blob/master/data...

There are several international lists too, here's a couple:

https://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways...

https://www.opentextingonline.com/emailtotext.aspx

Do they work? For Portugal it still lists Telecel - which hasn't existed since '99.

My list is accurate as of a year or so ago, or at least they don't bounce back when you send an email to them.

Thanks, this hack (if it's a hack) looks interesting.

It works, but know that it is nowhere as reliable as an SMS sent through a carrier's gateway.

I am using Telegram for such notifications. I made a simple Telegram bot, it does not do anything itself, I just use it as a sender of my messages to my phone. And I have a particular web address, which collects requests from any of my scripts and it just resends it (it is a simple python script) through the bot to me.

You can check Twilio's website for information.

Which MLS mobile app are you referring to?

SMTP is not an instantaneous protocol. Email prioritizes reliability over speed when it comes to delivery. An email alert could very well be delayed to the point that it becomes useless for something which is time sensitive.

Given the synchronous nature of a phone call, it seems like the perfect medium for this kind of alert. Similarly, SMS piggybacks off of the same network and therefore inherits some of the same properties.

I tried web alerts, but the emails were not instant, plus no phonecalls. Most the services I found didn't look reliable enough as I had no window for mistakes for my immigration. So I rolled my own.

> I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup

Doesn't the asynchronous nature of an IM make it less urgent than a synchronous phone call?

The industry I'm in is all SMEs - they regularly complain about people messaging them [ie SMS, aka "text"] out of work hours. Like "a customer texted me at 9pm about something how inconsiderate". They don't seem to understand it's absolutely considerate and that the idea is they respond when they next want to make themselves available. Mind you some people will get annoyed if they're not texted back straight away; why they don't then phone I'm not sure.

Yeah I've heard the same sentiment. I think people feel rude phoning because they feel rude ignoring calls, so if they call they're making the other party feel responsible for answering. This is silly of course.

> but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

Except when you are asleep.

And when it comes to immigration, you are happy to be woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call when it means the difference between failure and success.

Receiving phone calls is free, a data plan isn't :)

I use Pushover for (personal) things like this.

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