This step was considerably harder than the last, but the end result turned out to be pretty simple. Here’s how it works:

• I use matrix-commander on smirkingface to listen for new messages.
• For each message, I send it to my phone via email, from an address specific to that room.
• Upon recieving an email from my phone on ~team, I send the body to the Matrix room specified in the to address.

That’s really it. I did encounter some hurdles, though:

Getting MMS working over email was exceedingly easy because all of the work was already done for me; I just used my phone provider’s email gateway. There were a few hiccups, though:

• I can’t send messages with ~team because it’s blocked by my provider’s email gateway.
• I can’t just use smirkingface (my server) because my ISP prevents me from running an email server.

To get around the problem, I just use smirkingface to send messages and ~team to receive messages.

I made a friend online while locked-down during COVID who I want to continue communicating with. The problem, though, is that I do not use social media, and chat apps do not work for me no matter how hard I try. So after about a month of back-and-forth discussing possible solutions, we’ve thought of something that we think will work well for both of us: I’m going to run a Matrix to MMS-over-email bridge on my server.

This series will document the process of getting this to work, both because that’s interesting and because it will help me stay on schedule. What follows is a description of how it’s going to work and more detailed posts about it as I go along.

Overview