| One potential 1%-of-the-complexity answer to the problem of personal notification (which I presume was what email-to-self was solving) is to set up a Telegram bot. I recently really wanted realtime notifications on my phone (package tracking) and realized that all the top-level "send notifications to phone" type services are either mass push notification shops ($$$$) or bundled offerings ($$$) that were entirely overkill for my purposes. There are two ways to run a bot on Telegram, either by running the bot client directly (meh, interesting but extra setup) or by using Telegram's bot hosting system that works over HTTPS. It's the second approach that takes 3 minutes (!) to get to an MVP state for notifications. - You walk through a flow with a specific account (@Botfather) on Telegram to create a new bot account, which gives you an API key - Find the new bot using the search function then open a conversation with it and (after sending /start) send a junk message - Call `curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot$APIKEY/getUpdates"` and fish out the "chat"->"id" value from the JSON representation of the message you just sent to obtain your user ID - Call something like `curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot$APIKEY/sendMessage" -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"chat_id":"1234567890","text":"boop"}'` (set chat_id to your account id) to send a new message - yup, it's literally this simple to send messages - Go into Telegram's settings and add the bot as a notification exception (assuming you have notifications universally turned off by default) - If you also set the full-screen popup to "when off" Telegram will (even when your device is locked) show an instant notification containing the sent text - Because this is a conversation, the message history will be preserved unless you explicitly delete the messages (which you can do on a per-message basis) - The Telegram bot API supports both polling and push-based I/O, where you can periodically poll /getUpdates or have Telegram call a webhook you configure. IMHO the way easier approach is just running the bot client locally at that point, *but*, for just sending out one-way notifications where replies don't matter, the default polling setting (no webhooks) is ideal as the bot server will delete un-acknowledged messages after IIRC 24 hours or so - so you don't have to worry about queue quotas or whatever, you can just ignore the whole receive side and it just works Obviously the caveat is that this is 1% of the complexity and equally 1% of the... provenance, for want of a better way to put it. But in terms of "I need realtime notifications now" I am yet to find a better system. It worked perfectly. |