Twitter via e-mail

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:24:45 +0000

Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do.

So, obviously, I wrote one this weekend: Mixamail.com.

I’ve kept it as simple as I could. If I send an email to twitter@mixamail.com, it replies with the latest tweets on my Twitter home page. If I mail it again, it replies with new tweets since the last email.

I can update my status by sending a mail with “Update” as the subject. The first line of the body is the status.

I can reply to tweets. The tweets contain a “reply” link that opens a new mail and replies to it.

I can subscribe to tweets. Sending an email with “subscribe” as the subject sends the day’s tweets back to me every day at the same hour that I subscribed. (I’m keeping it down to daily for the moment, but if I use it enough, may expand it to a higher frequency.)

Soon enough, I’ll add re-tweeting and (update: added retweets on 27 Oct) a few other things. I intend keeping this free. Will release the source as well once I document it. The source code is at Github.

Give it a spin: Mixamail.com. Let me know how it goes!

For the technically minded, here are a few more details. I spent last night scouting for a small, nice, domain name using nxdom. I bought it using Google Apps for $10. The application itself is written in Python and hosted on AppEngine. I use the Twitter API via OAuth and store the user state via Lilcookies. The HTML is based on html5boilerplate, and has no images.

Comments

Jayson 26 Oct 2010 6:41 pm: Pretty neat work! What was the time taken for this to be done?
S Anand 26 Oct 2010 6:46 pm: Let’s see… 5 hours on Sunday to get the Twitter API working… 4 hours yesterday to get the user management sorted… about 5 hours today to get the UI done. About 14 hours so far.
Aravinda 26 Oct 2010 6:52 pm: Very nice app :)
Praveen 26 Oct 2010 8:03 pm: Awesome app.
pgt 27 Oct 2010 11:25 pm: have you checked out posterous.com , they do twitter among other things
Rockey 27 Oct 2010 11:31 pm: Tussi Great ho !
Amitesh 2 Nov 2010 7:23 am: Hey, I am not a techie but this application looks sure value to me. Great work!

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