80lvl mail crutch or life hack for 21 rubles

After reading the topics “10 anti-crisis phones up to 1000 rubles” and “Twitter bought an Indian startup” , I decided to write this article, since in the current economic conditions my life hack might be useful to someone else.

It all started with the fact that at the end of 2013, my smartphone based on the Android OS, began to spontaneously call on different numbers from the contact list. The reset to the factory settings and repeated flashing of the device did not lead to success. Therefore, I decided to buy a phone that is not subject to virus attacks and memory shortage problems, having a more or less “survivable” battery. The choice fell on the Philips Xenium X1510 (please do not consider advertising, but a continuation of the topic of anti-crisis phones).

Apart from ridicule from colleagues and friends, the phone suited me all, except the possibility of receiving notifications about new letters in the mailbox. And now I will tell you how I solved this problem.

As befits a sysadmin, at home I have a non-shutdown computer, which is proudly referred to as a home server, and in fact stores three films and 20 folders “parse 3” . It was installed mail client The Bat. As many know, this email client has a letter sorter with a very rich and flexible functionality, from which, personally, I was very useful to run the executable file upon receipt of any letter.
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Next, an old 3G modem, with the unlocked voice call function, was extracted from the dust box, and under it in Delphi 7, a program was written, the main task of which was to send the "ATD + my phone number;" command to initiate the call and interrupt after 30 seconds him. Thus, I realized the possibility of receiving a call when a new email arrives. It remains only to induce a marafet - for 21 rubles (3 rubles / word), the freelance girl recorded the phrase “In your e-mail inbox a new message”, at the end of which a 20-second silence was added. And this sound file was set as a call to the number from which the 3G modem is calling.
This way, I get a free notification about every email.

What came out of this can be seen in the video:



A 3G modem can, of course, send SMS, but each message will cost a little money, and the call option is free. It would be possible to use SMS-notification about new letters to Mail.ru, but for this you need to set up additional forwarding, and messages come every 30 minutes.