Q: How does mail2.im work?
A: Extremely cleverly, grasshopper
Q: Who are you guys anyway?
A: A
shadowy group indeed
Q: Won't you read all my messages?
A: No we read our own messages.
Your messages we just forward and then later shred
Q: How does someone send me a message?
A: The simplest way is for them to email you at your mail2.im account. If your user id is "bob", then if they email you at "bob@mail2.im", we'll forward you the message
Q: How do I get messages to go to my phone, my twitter accounts, or my instant messenger accounts?
A: If you're online on IM, we'll send to the IM account you used most recently. Otherwise, we'll send to the phone or email or twitter account you used most recently
Q: Great! How do I add a phone or IM account or twitter account, man?
A: Look for the email you got from mail2.im after you signed up. If you click on that link, you'll go to the account management page where you can add different accounts
Q: Ok I got a message from someone forwarded to my IM. How do I reply from there? Do I have to go email the guy?
A: Nope! Just put the person's userid or email address - any email address - as the first word of your IM back to mail2im. We'll then forward the message
Q: I guess the phone works the same way?
A: Almost... For texting, you need to put "mail2.im" at the front of your reply, and THEN put your friend's userid or email address.
Q: Thats stupid. Why do I need to put mail.2im at the beginning of my text message?
A: mail2.im phone numbers can be shared by other services, so to be certain that you get to us on all numbers, we decided to ask you to put "mail2.im" at the front of all text messages
Q: How does adding a twitter account work? I don't get any messages from you
A: First add the account. Then make sure you've allowed mail2im to follow you, and be sure to follow mail2im back. Now within a minute or so you should get a direct message with the link to click on and verify your twitter account from
Q: Is there some limit to the number of phone numbers and stuff that I can have?
A: Nope! Just keep adding them, and we'll keep sending to the one you used most recently. So when you land at Heathrow and take out your UK phone, use mail2.im right away to tell everyone you've landed, and all mail2.im replies will hit your UK phone instead of your US, or Canada, or Botswana or whatever phone you were using before
Q: Cool! So I just bought a pre-paid SIM to use while I'm here in Botswana. Do I have to now find a computer to add this number?
A: You can do that. But actually, there is a shortcut. If you find that "add 16665551212 asdfas" kind of message we sent you when you first added your phone, you'll find you can use that. Of course, replace "16665551212" with your new Botswana number, including the country code, and with no other characters. Send that to +1-905-407-0388 and, if you get a reply, you'll get further instructions on finishing and be good to go
Q: Is there a limit on message size? Can I get the rest of the message?
A: Yep we truncate the messages at about 250 characters. Nope, we don't keep the rest of the message... mail2.im is really not a replacement for your full mail system,its just a way to ensure that urgent short messages reach you in the way thats the most convenient for you
Q: Is this all free?
A: Most of the time.
We don't charge you for any messages UNLESS you're using an unsupported carrier. You'll know you're using an unsupported carrier because you will have selected UNSUPPORTED when you added your phone number
If you're using a supported carrier, even though we don't charge in that case to use text messaging, check your plan to know the price of text messages. You need to know what your carrier charges, as we don't pay those charges for you, and they might add up depending on your plan.
When in the US, be sure to use 368266 instead of our international number if you can. The first time you use the US number, you need to resend that "add 16665551212 asdfas" message to verify yourself on that carrier.
Q: What if I never want to pay anything?
Easy. Never fund your account. If we can't send outbound to your phone for free, we'll send it to the next most recently used place in your account list.
Q: I'm using a supported carrier and I get these weird annoying messages
We're using a special gateway to send messages to you at low cost. For some carriers, this means they'll charge you something or make do you something strange to receive these messages.
Assuming you don't want to find another carrier, or delete SMS from your account, the best thing you can do is delete your phone and add it again selecting "UNSUPPORTED" as the carrier. You'll then have to fund your account a little. After that, we'll send using the pay gateway which should look like a normal message.
Q: Why don't you have a local number in my country?
We're just getting going and probably don't have enough users in your country yet. Invite lots of people and we'll get a local number there if we can.
Q: Why don't you support my carrier anyway?
If we cannot access them at low cost, we call them "unsupported" as we need to get you to fund the account to cover the charges.
If you think they have an email-to-sms gateway, or you think they have some other special deal we should know about, send us a note and we'll take a look
