e2j: email2jabber gateway

About

Several of my friends have commented on how amazing Google Calendar was, and as far as web-based calendars go I had to agree.

But there was one fatal shortcoming, something that surprised me. Despite their Google Talk service, one can only get notifications via a pop-up, email, or SMS text messaging. I don't tend to use my Google Account all that often, so a pop-up was out of the question. Text messaging is fairly expensive ($0.10 per message? I hate you too, Cingular), so this was also not an option.

Why does Google not offer notifications via IM? This seems like an easy thing to do, and their fault has led to this project.

One can receive notifications via emails, though these emails are delivered to your Gmail account. Thankfully, Gmail supports customized filters that can forward emails to a specified address. Aha! Enter the email2jabber gateway.

Usage

Setting up your accounts properly to get notifications via IM is a somewhat complicated process, but this quick guide will hopefully help you get set up. An important prerequisite is that you have both a Google Account (these are relatively easy to obtain these days) and also a Jabber account on a federated, server-to-server capable Jabber server. Some common, public examples of these include Google Talk, LJTalk, and just about anything listed by the XMPP Federation.

AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and similar accounts are not supported at this time, but they might be in the future with sufficient interest.

So now, the steps to getting set up:

1. Set up your Google Calendar to send notifications via email. Click the Settings link in the upper part of the page, and then browse to the Notifications tab. It should be fairly obvious how to enable the email notifications for the various types of events.
2. Set up your Gmail account to forward emails properly. We will do this via a filter so that only messages from the Google Calendar notification service are forwarded. From the Gmail page, again navigate to the Settings and then the Filters tab.
3. Click the New Filter link near the bottom of the tab.
4. In the From: box for the filter, enter the address calendar-notification@google.com. Make sure you enter it as specified, with no spaces. Click the Next Step button.
5. Now you need to enter in the address to which to forward the notifications. This has a special syntax so the gateway service can properly understand the recipient.
   • All Jabber accounts have a unique Jabber ID or JID of the form username@somedomain.com, similar to an email address. For example, the Google Talk user "iloveponies123" has a JID of iloveponies123@gmail.com; the LJTalk user "emoteen4392" has a JID of emoteen4392@livejournal.com.
   • Since JIDs resemble email addresses, we must change it slightly to insert into a forwardable email address. In this case, the @ in your JID is changed to a #.
   • The email address to forward to is then given as <your converted JID>@e2j.jeffsweb.net. In the previous examples, "iloveponies123" would use iloveponies123#gmail.com@e2j.jeffsweb.net and "emoteen4392" would use emoteen4392#livejournal.com@e2j.jeffsweb.net.
6. Enter in the above address as the Forward it to: address, and check off the Delete option as well if you'd like.
7. Now sit back, relax, and schedule up your calendar! You might want to schedule a test event to be sure the notifications are working.

Privacy/Disclaimer

I may monitor the service and the messages sent through it from time to time to watch usage and fix bugs as they arise. I am not logging any data, but if you feel that your messages are too sensitive you may not wish to use this service. Keep in mind that you really aren't important or interesting enough for me to care.

Furthermore, I make no guarantees about the quality of this service, especially given its somewhat unstable nature. Email and IM are both a bit lossy, and it is likely that some messages will fail to pass through the gateway. I also reserve the right to take the service down at any point without notice. I predict that Google will eventually add this ability natively to their service, and I may not deem it necessary to continue.

Comments

Questions, comments, complaints? Send an email to e2j at jeffsweb dot net.