Really cool project, I didn't know about the sms gateway thing, apparently my mobile carrier had this gateway but not anymore. I'll do more research

Thanks for sharing

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 21:56 DJ Chase u9000@tilde.team wrote:

Hi all,

In the spirit of this list's rejuvenation, I thought I'd share a fun project I did recently with ~team.

For context: I use a flip-phone (it's much less distracting than a smartphone), so I cannot use an app or browser to check the weather when getting dressed every morning. And I can't call NOAA to get the weather because the dial-a-forecast number for my state is out of service.

So, I made a script that texts me the weather and made a cronjob to run that every morning. The script was surprisingly simple:

    #!/bin/sh

    WEATHER="/tmp/$(uuidgen)"

    curl --silent https://wttr.in/<LOCATION>.png?1Fqn > "$WEATHER"
    mutt -a "$WEATHER" -- 8005551234@mms-gateway.example
    rm "$WEATHER"

I used wttr.in here because its api is increadibly simple (it's literally the same thing as its UI). This does mean, though, that I had to send it as an image because wttr returns formatted text that wraps horrible.

Many cell providers have an email to SMS/MMS gateway, so it was really easy to send a text; it should be easy to find this via a search engine. I also used mutt here instead of something POSIXly correct to make attachments simpler — this is just a hack, after all.

Cheers,

DJ Chase (~u9000) They, Them, Theirs

It's also safe to assume that the gateway method isn't privacy friendly either, lol email and phone networks aren't privacy friendly, they can literally be intercepted by the government at any time

Btw, I just found another domain for my mobile carrier but it didn't work either, I'm only finding posts from 2010 :/

Wish me luck

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 22:46 DJ Chase u9000@posteo.net wrote:

On Fri Apr 15, 2022 at 11:24 PM EDT, Santiago Forero wrote:

...

Really cool project,

Thank you.

...

I didn't know about the sms gateway thing, apparently my mobile carrier had this gateway but not anymore. I'll do more research

I think there are also some commercial email-to-text services that allow a free message per day. I assume they're not privacy-friendly though.

:),

DJ Chase (~u9000) They, Them, Theirs

Your mail server bounced this back to me (I'm fairly certain my client is improperly configured), so this is a forward:

On Sat Apr 16, 2022 at 1:17 AM EDT, DJ Chase wrote:

On Fri Apr 15, 2022 at 11:51 PM EDT, Santiago Forero wrote:

...

It's also safe to assume that the gateway method isn't privacy friendly either, lol email and phone networks aren't privacy friendly, they can literally be intercepted by the government at any time

True. Email and {S,M}MS are plaintext. I meant "privacy friendly" with a threat model of 'I don't want to have targeted advertisements and whatnot'.

...

Btw, I just found another domain for my mobile carrier but it didn't work either, I'm only finding posts from 2010 :/

Here's a short list[1] from 2019. There's also freecarrierlookup.com, but it appears to be broken right now.

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/sms-gateway-from-email-to-sms-text-message-2495456

...

Wish me luck

Goodluck!

-- DJ Chase (~u9000) They, Them, Theirs