TxtJet: Get your email via SMS. Works with the dumbest of phones.

While I would venture to say that the majority of TNW readers are proud, smartphone-carrying technology junkies, you surely have the friend that isn’t. For whatever reason, they’ve insisted on keeping that old dumbphone. If that’s the case, and they still want to be able to get email, TxtJet can help them to do just that.

TxtJet is supremely simple. Just head to the site, enter (and verify) your mobile number and then enter the details for which email account you’d like to have forwarded to you. You’ll have to decide whether you trust the site with your email credentials or not, but it is at least fully encrypted.

We use 256 bit encryption and a uniquely generated key for all sensitive data, as well as SSL/TLS for all transmission unless disabled by the end-user. TxtJet needs your email password since it works in a similar manner as an email client such as, Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail etc. TxtJet needs to be able to verify to your email provider that “you” are allowing “us” to retrieve your messages on your behalf. We feel that TxtJet in fact provides a more secure environment than a traditional desktop client, since most store and transmit data in plain text.

There’s very little customization that you can do, but that’s part of what we like about TxtJet. You can set the maximum number of text that an email will trigger, a “sleep zone” of time in which you won’t receive messages and there are white and blacklists for filtering.

What else? Well, nothing. TxtJet states that the service is free for now, but that it does reserve the right to advertise as its costs increase. Fair enough, from our standpoint. The service’s main obstacle to success is in convincing people to give up not only their phone numbers but also their email addresses. If it can prove that its actions are as good as its intentions, that obstacle will be overcome in short measure.

There’s another, more real factor about what TxtJet can do that seems to have not been mentioned. The SMS has been designed to be disaster-proof. Though it doesn’t always work, it will almost always work better than a data connection. In times of impending problems, people could sign up for TxtJet preemptively in order to keep in better contact until the problems subside.

The service is free and it’s worth a look. Can you trust it? Only you can answer that question. From where we’re sitting, it’s still absolutely worth a look. After all, don’t be fooled into thinking that your email address hasn’t already been sold by some other company anyway.