Instant Mobile Messaging - Pull Me Push Me Make Me Beep

Several weeks ago a new version of our popular UK product Bulletin Mail was released with support for external IMAP, POP3, and Jabber/XMPP servers. A Bulletin Mail account gives the user an email address which maps to their mobile allowing anyone to email your phone without knowing your number.

The new functionality allows you to connect up any number of IMAP, POP3, and XMPP accounts to provide even more pushed email to your mobile. Once configured the service monitors your email accounts in the background looking for new and unread messages to to push to your mobile via an SMS alert, and a WAP based "full content" display.

Any XMPP connections maintain a low priority, server-side "/mobile" resource offering mobile connectivity to online contacts, with new IM messages pushed to your handset via the same SMS/WAP interface. The beauty of this combination comes from having the majority of communications on the server: no need for constant GPRS connections/charges, and no need for GPRS/WAP at all (unless you want to make use of the extended functionality).

All server connections are SSL encrypted, and honour Spam Assassin headers for dropping spam (as well as the services own filter/blocking rules).

I find it somewhat amusing that it wasn't untill my membership to the Jabber Software Foundation expired that I actually got Jabber related code into production, but thats the way it goes isn't it?

Maybe I'll reapply when the time comes...

tags: xmpp  mobile  sms  jabber  

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