Monday, February 5, 2007

I miss Blackberry's Level 1 alerts!

One of the Blackberry features I really LOVE is the Level 1 alerting. I am a manager of a 24/7 technical support company and on occasion there would be a problem, in the middle of the night, that I would need to know about. When I had a Blackberry I would set-up a filter that made any email with the word "HELP" in the subject line a Level 1 message (not to be confused with message importance) and then set my phone to only alert me to Level 1 messages at night.

When I moved over to Windows Mobile I really missed this feature! I searched around looking for software that could duplicate this feature but turned up empty handed. After thinking about what I was trying to accomplish I came up with a pretty decent workaround.

The Level 1 Work Around:
  1. In Outlook I set-up a new rule under "Rules and Alerts" that will forward any message with the work "HELP" in the subject line to my cell phone's SMS gateway email address.
  2. Before I go to bed I turn ActiveSync, on my phone, to sync "Manually". This way my phone will not check and alert me to new messages.
  3. I set my SMS ring tone to be a really long tone so that it wakes me up (I am a heavy sleeper). Another option would be to install software like PhoneAlarm that will repeat the notification (which I wish was built into Windows Mobile).

It works great. Hope this workaround helps others in my same situation! BTW, if you know of a better way please drop me a comment.

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