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Communicate with InReach Via E-mail?

Derrick
over 3 years ago

Is there a way for me to E-mail my InReach device? It appears the "@inreach.garmin.com" address is only valid for InReach-2-InReach communication.

Or any other way to communicate with the device via an exchange server?

I have a script that gets very specific weather information each day and I want to use that to push a small message to my InReach every 24 hours while I am on outings (to give me some more detailed information than what DarkSky provides).

e-mail-2-text clients don't work either since those don't provide the sender a static 10 digit phone number.

Any ideas with how I might be able to accomplish this would be much appreciated!

Thank you,

Derrick

  • +1 over 3 years ago

    Short answer is no. This is an anti-spam feature - because you pay for every message to or from your device (depending on your plan, of course).

    As you have discovered, that thing that looks like an email address ([email protected]) is actually the device address for iR to iR messaging. It has no other use.

    When you send a message from the device to an email address, the recipient cannot simply reply to the email. Instead, the email contains a link to a web page from which the recipient can reply.

    The recipient can directly reply to an SMS (text) message. However, the phone number is not static, and is not (even temporarily) associated with just one device. The ability to reply to a particular SMS message has a limited lifetime. Nobody knows just how long this interval is, but it's on the order of several weeks. Most of us "prime the pump" at the start of a trip. We send SMS messages to everybody who we want to be able to reach us during the trip. (The ability to reply depends on information which is retained on the Garmin servers associating the original recipient's phone number, the number the SMS gateway used to send the original message, and the iR device ID.)

    Bottom line is that your desire to send email to the device is incompatible with the system's anti-spam design. You can probably do something with SMS if you are willing to prime the pump periodically AND change the target SMS address each time.

    Edited to add: It doesn't help in this scenario, but if you permit it, people with access to your MapShare page can send a message at any time.

    There is an API, which is only for enterprise customers (not for individual accounts). It does permit sending an unsolicited text message to a device associated with the enterprise account. But the API is not available to individual accounts.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to twolpert

    Thank you for the very informative reply. This confirms most of the things I was seeing. Seems like I will be unable to accomplish what I want to do without an enterprise account, maybe one day that might be available for individual use. I definitely understand the need for implementation of the anti-spam feature. I definitely am trying to do some fringe use case type thing. I will keep dreaming of a way to do it haha. Thank you again.