Stefan Helander

Automatic SMS / text message to email forward

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Sometimes my clients send me messages as SMS or “texts” on my mobile phone. That might be relevant for an urgent matter but often is being used instead of mail. From my clients view, they just see it as another, non-intrusive, way of sending me a message instead of calling which is polite as a phone call can be more interrupting than a text message.

A problem with SMS or text messages is that when they arrive I must read it to be able to decide if it is urgent and need immediate attention or if it can be responded to later. Once read, the “new message” notification on my phone is gone and I must remember to handle it later. There is a risk that I might forget.

My clients are also the reason I’m in business so I’m not complaining about my clients contacting my in any way (well ok, I might complain if they call me at 3 in the night wanting to discuss some non critical issue 🙂 ). Instead I find solutions and make things work better.

So one way of handling the problem of forgetting matters sent to me via SMS or text was that I installed an app in my phone that automatically forwards any incoming SMS as an email to my inbox. That way I can sort it into my normal work handling queues or even my ticket system.

There are many apps available for this, some free, some paid, with different amount of features in it. Some has advanced filtering and some can forward only messages from specific senders (or vice versa, forward all messages except from specfic senders).

In my case the best solution was just a simple app that forwards all incoming SMS as email so I use Relay Me (yes, I use Android) which works for me. There are probably similar solutions on other, non Android, platforms.

The best solution is to set up a specfic email account for the app (like yourphonenumber@somedomain.com for example), not using your normal email account, because the app works both ways. If you reply to an email on your inbox that originated as a SMS via Relay Me, the reply will be picked up by the app and sent back as SMS to the sender.

For obvoius reasons the app will need data connection to the Internet to be able to send emails, so having a data plan on your mobile subscription is a good idea. The reason I liked Relay Me was, apart from other things, that it works directly with my own email servers, so there are no intermediate servers handling my messages.

Stefan Helander

Microsoft Office 365 SSL certificate error in Outlook [solved]

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Clients moving over to Office 365 who had purchased a valid SSL certificate for their mail server still got SSL certificate errors in Outlook and mobile clients. This was despite the mail service was equipped with a valid SSL certificate (not self signed, but issued by a real CA).

It turns out here that Outlook seems to investigate https root domain (i.e. the customer’s web site) for auto configuration before trying autodiscover.customerdomain.com. And if there is no valid SSL certificate installed on the customers web site, an error is displayed. This was verified by examining the customer’s web site logs where we could se repetitive accesses to /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml.

If only Outlook just would have ignored the SSL error and continued to the next method….

A simple solution was just to add a valid SSL certificate to the customer’s web site, and the problem was solved. That way Outlook didn’t get SSL certificate error when trying to retrieve the non-existing autoconfiguration information from the customer’s web site.

Stefan Helander

Should I use hotmail / gmail / yahoo etc for my business email?

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When you are starting your new business you will need an email address. As a small, startup company it can be tempting to go for the quick, cheap and easy solutions. Is it a good idea to use one of the free email services like hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc as your company email?

My answer is no. I normally don’t recommend it for several reasons. The free services are great for private use, but not for business.

  • Buying your own domain name is cheap.
  • Your own domain name will also market your business name, making it easier for your clients to remember you.
  • It gives you a more trustworthy appearance towards your clients, when you are not building your business on a free service, sharing the domain name with thousands of others.
  • Hotmail, for example, has very “trigger happy” spam filters which means you will most certainly find legitimate emails from a new sender in the spam folder along with real spam emails. You have to tell Hotmail that this was not a spam to “teach” it not to put emails from this sender again in the spam folder. To make sure you don’t miss important business emails you will have to check your spam folders on an hourly basis.

I had a client who lost several assignments because of legitimite client requests ending up in the spam folder at Hotmail. When the emails was found in the Hotmail spam folder, the assignments had already gone to competitors.

We switched the client over to using a domain name of their own, hosted at a hosting company targeting businesses, with spam filters that were a bit more allowing. Meaning, sometimes a spam would end up in the inbox but legitimite emails never ended up in the spam folder.

The client was very used to the Hotmail interface, so we just connected the new email account with their own domain name email account, at the new hosting provider, throught IMAP to the Hotmail account.

This way they could continue to work in the Hotmail (or Outlook OWA) interface with their new email account under their own domain name. So they now just used Hotmail as their “email program” because they were used to it.

When replying to emails sent to their own domain name, the own domain name email account was automatically used for the reply. Only when writing a new email they have to select the account with their own domain name (otherwise, by default, the new email is sent from the Hotmail account).