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Any way this weird email thing can be done?

Context, aka why do I even want to do this

I'm heavily considering buying a Sunbeam Wireless dumbphone, since there's nothing I *need* a smartphone for... except for one thing, and that's replying to Dreamwidth comments on the go. It's on the smoller, more retro side of social media, and I don't want to give that up. (Okay, I admit it, I'm a roleplayer, and my partners and I really boomerang those replies when I have downtime at work. I don't want to have to wait until I get home to comment on my computer.)

With Dreamwidth it's possible to either reply on the webpage itself or by responding to the notification email they send you, so you'd think I could just have the comment notifications sent to my SMS "email address" (+15558675309@provider.com), and I could reply to that, right? Well... the tricky thing is, the notification email has a separate "reply-to" address that differs for every single notification, and is used to identify the comment you're replying to. SMS doesn't support this. I can *receive* the notification perfectly fine as a text message, but if I reply, it goes to the default sender address, and so my reply just vanishes into the aether. RIP.

It's so frustrating. This is the *one* single sticking point I have. (I've suggested to my RP partners that we swap to using email, but they're not on board. We've been using the Livejournal/Dreamwidth form factor for this purpose for, like, twenty years at this point, so... yeah.)

Thing I'm considering, stop me if this is impossible

After wracking my brain for a solution (and even conversing with Dreamwidth's owner about my problem; she's sympathetic but doesn't have any ideas), I keep coming back to this:

Receive the comment notification with mutt
Extract the reply-to address and save it as a variable
Forward the notification to my SMS "email address"
On my phone, reply via SMS
Back on the server with mutt, take the incoming email and forward it to the saved reply-to address

I've never used mutt -- just never got around to trying it out, and my schedule these days doesn't leave me a lot of free time -- but thinking through the logic of this order of operations, it *feels* like it should be possible?

Any thoughts from the brains of Geminispace? Is it worth trying to do this or will it just turn out to be a dead end?

🐝 november

Nov 05 · 8 weeks ago · 👍 jmjl

3 Comments ↓

🐐 satch · Nov 05 at 21:35:

What is the draw of a Sunbeam Wireless dumbphone instead of something cheaper like an Alcatel flipphone?

Also, I'm certain this email <==> text thing is possible using mutt on a server, but it would be quite some work to get working properly

🚀 mbays · Nov 06 at 08:36:

I expect you could do this with procmail -- one recipe to forward the correct mails to your phone, and another to forward the ones from the phone to the correct address, with some appropriate munging on the way to make sure the correct address survives (maybe by using user+data_stored_here@example.com as the From address of the mail to your phone). May take some work to get right, though.

🐝 november · Nov 07 at 20:36:

Thanks, I'll try tinkering with that. (A family member wound up buying me an almost brand-new Nokia smartphone, so I may as well put off buying anything else for myself for a while.)