How to get emails on your cell phone

Ever need to know when an important email is arriving when you are away from your computer, running errands, on vacation or while you are commuting? Maybe you've seen people romancing their Blackberries or Treos, but you just can't see locking into an expensive new phone and a hefty 2 year service contract? In a few minutes, and just for the cost of the text messages you use, you can turn your regular cell phone into an email tool for receiving your most important messages, and even to reply or initiate an email.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Regular cell phone with text messaging capability
• Email address and password of the account you want to forward to your cell phone
• The email addresses of those contacts you wish to have sent to your cell phone

1. Visit www.teleflip.com
2. Enter your email address and mobile phone number
3. Grab your phone and find the text message with the authorization code to verify that you have the phone you are registering
4. Enter your email password - don't worry - this information is encrypted and is only used for the purposes of enabling this email forwarding service
5. Add your contacts (you can enter them one by one or upload a contact book from a major webmail program or an Outlook file)and then turn the contacts ON or OFF to allow or prevent email forwarding. Why not add your close family members, friends, coworkers, or even yourself so that you can email yourself notes and see them on your phone. For each contact, you can set up a "Nickname" so that you can reply easily without having to type their whole email address on your phone's keypad.
6. Once you are done, you can let other people know about this cool service
7. Other options for controlling this service are available after the registration process: turning email on/off, scheduling it for certain hours of the weekday or weekend, setting a cap for the number of SMS messages per email, changing your email, email password or phone number.
8. When someone on your contact list sends you an email, it is forwarded to your phone as a series of text messages. Tell your friends to email you so that you can check it out!

Tips & Warnings

• You can turn the service on or off any time by replying to any message from the service with START or STOP in the body of the text message
• You can reply to a person's message by replying to one of the text messages from the service, typing a nickname (why not use initials to make it easy for yourself?), a space, and the message you want to send to their email
• If your contacts also use this service, they can get your emails sent to their cell phones and reply to your email/cell phone
• Consult with your cell phone provider's plan to ensure that you have an appropriate text messaging limit and cost to cover your expected use of the service