SMS2Mail

Please note that this is a beta, v0.1 !, before you use it!

This is really important, since I have only tested it on my phone and I won't be held responsible if it causes a crash/loses messages in your inbox etc. That said, it shouldn't delete anything in your inbox and I have tested it quite a bit myself and it seems stable enough to put it out there.

What does it do?

SMS2Mail is a simple program and it seems weird that, whilst everyone has been busy writing Pacman clones etc nobody's actually sorted out this major omission from Smartphone. Essentially the program is run from the phone whereupon it converts all SMS in your inbox to e-mails in your outbox (on the phone). Don't worry; the SMS look the same as emails, it's just that Microsoft thought they'd give us two types of message, one of which won't sync properly. So having done this, on synchronisation these messages are transferred to your PC outbox and deleted from the phone. From there, you can (or, to be honest, need to) move them to a stored SMS folder.

How do I use it?

1. Ensure ActiveSync is set to sync the inbox. (Change it back afterwards so you can send/receive email on the phone).
2. Copy the SMS2Email.exe program to the device, probably a folder like IPSM/Windows/Start Menu/Accessories.
3. Run the program. It will take a few minutes to run if you have 100s of messages; if you want to check it's progress you can have a look at the outbox folder - but this will be slow! A further message will appear afterwards anyway to let you know it has finished. (NB lack of a user interface is a known issue!)
4. Sync the phone - you may need to re-insert it into the cradle.
5. Create a folder in Outlook called SMS (or in fact whatever you want). This can be done by going to File->Folder->New Folder. Set it to store e-mails.
6. Right-click the 'From' field in the header window, select 'Field Chooser'. Drag the 'From' bar to the little window that has opened and drag the 'To' bar in it's place (i.e. replace From with To). This, at the moment, is a known issue with the way the program works - SMS come out as 'To' someone rather than 'From' them.
7. Drag all the SMS from the Outbox into this folder. You may have noticed that in the Outbox the date/time do not display properly. This is how the Outbox works and why you have created an SMS folder.
8. That's it. Since this is such an early beta, the messages are not removed from your phone inbox, you have to delete them by hand (a nightmare if you let the inbox get huge like I did), but an 'empty inbox' command will be included very shortly.

Comments

I will be a little short of time until next Tuesday (08/04/03) so I decided to put this program out now rather than work on it a bit more after then. There are loads of things still to do and the way it works isn't brilliant. If you notice any bugs, please let me know, preferably via the Forum or by private message on Modaco, failing all else via email but there may be so many bugs I don't want to be deluged! Also, source code in eVC++ will follow soon once tidied up a bit.

Finally, please note that as of 2006 this program is no longer supported. I don't know if it works on Smartphones any more; I made the move to Pocket PC phones. If you're interested in that, please see my other site, Pebls.

Tom NOSPAM Grek