email2sms - an e-mail to SMS filter

email2sms is a filter written in Perl which converts an e-mail into a compressed form suitable for sending as an SMS message. It's intended for use with procmail, but you could easily use it in other ways.

Please note that it does not provide any mechanism for actually sending the SMS message; it only generates a message appropriate for being sent. You will need to use some sort of internet (web or e-mail) to SMS gateway to actually send the message. You'll have to find the appropriate gateway on your own, I'm afraid, since finding one is dependent on which country you're in and which phone network you use. There are also various tools available for using these gateways easier. Several UNIX-based ones can be found on freshmeat, and here is a Windows-based one. Please don't ask me for advice on gateways; unless it is directly relevant to email2sms in some way, I'll probably just ignore it.

There is already a good program out there called mail2sms, which does exactly this, so why on earth did I write this program?

Two reasons:

Due to its amazing text processing capabilities, Perl is IMHO the best tool for this job, and as we all know, you gotta have the right tool for the job, Beavis. 'Tool'. Mmmheh.
I wanted to use Lingua::EN::Squeeze, that really cool CPAN module written by Jari Aalto. This is where email2sms has its main advantage over mail2sms -- it uses this Squeeze module to compress the text to around 40% of its original size. Sounds crazy? You'd be surprised how much redundancy there is in the English language (yes, even in the hands of people who know how to use it ...).

Features

Cool text compression (see above)
Full MIME support
Removal of attribution lines and quoted material
Fully configurable (well almost; still need to add the capability of user-defined regexp substitutions to the message body). You can currently configure:
- Maximum output length
- Section and line delimiters
- Multiple From: header subtitutions
- regexps used in removal of attribution lines and quoted material
- Strength of Squeeze algorithm (you specify several strengths, and it tries them until the output is less than the maximum specified, or until it's using the strongest compression).
Optional auto-responder to alert sender that some detail was lost. Thanks to Ry4an Brase for the idea and original code for this!

Preview

So what does the typical output look like? Something like this (the line breaks wouldn't appear on your mobile):

comp.lang.perl.announce moderator$[thiIsAutmtedMsgFromPrlScript.]/Postng
4Cmp.lng.prl.nnnceHasBenRcivAndQueu.I/wSndUMsgWhenIChoseToEithrAcceptOr
RejectPostngITryToProcPostngAtLstOncEverySevenDD,ButGenrlyItHasBenLot+/
OftnThan(wthnMINIfImOn-lin,F_xmple).AprovedChartSay

Can you understand that? It was an automated message from when I submitted something to comp.lang.perl.announce. With a bit of practice, and a quick read of the documentation for Lingua::EN::Squeeze, you'll be surprised how much you can squeeze into one or two SMS messages and still understand enough of it for it to be useful.

Download

You can download any of the following:

a tarball of everything (except Lingua::EN::Squeeze, which you should install from CPAN).
email2sms source, written in Perl
documentation for Lingua::EN::Squeeze
a sample .email2smsrc configuration file
a sample Perl script for sending e-mail via a typical WWW e-mail to SMS gateway
a patch to the Squeeze module to avoid a silly warning
the change log

See the INSTALL file for installation instructions.

Feedback

As with all my software, all suggestions / bug reports / patches (unified or context diff only please) are very welcome; please contact me by e-mail.