Antarctica Marathon 2014: Tweeting and Facebook via Email from Antarctica

Antarctica Marathon 2014: Tweeting and Facebook via Email from Antarctica

This is a post about how to get tweet and Facebook via onboard email from your boat in Antarctica.

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Oepolar email

When you sign up, you get your own unique oepolar email address (mines was bigpolar+324k@oepolar.com) by room number and last name. It is set up at reception, $30 for the entire cruise, to send/receive email. You will not have access to your personal email but make sure you save some email address so you can email them via this email so you can get email.

To set up Facebook, find your private Facebook email address to post status updates. Check out this website on how to find your email address to update Facebook status. You can do much more than just a status but when I used the email, we couldn’t upload photos so I only updated my status.

http://email.about.com/od/Facebook-Messages-Tips/qt/How-To-Post-Updates-And-Upload-Photos-By-Email-In-Facebook.htm

For Twitter by email, you need tweetymail. However, it will only allow you to send from a confirmed email address. The easiest way to set this up is to have someone back at home sign into tweetymail with your new email address and then also having them to click on the confirmation link as you won’t have internet access. You will need to forward them the confirmation email and have someone click on it. Once that happens, you will be all set up. [I did exactly this but tweetymail did not work. I am not sure what the issue was, but tweetymail didn’t really work well when I tested it the day before.]

You can also use google scripts to try to autoforward messages based on labels in Gmail but you are only limited to 100 messages per day (limitations in google scripts). You may want to do this if you don’t have someone back at home to help you set up tweetymail with your new email address. I never got this working properly so I would avoid. The code in the google scripts is fairly simple.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/auto-forward-gmail-messages/20665/

The reason why you need google scripts is that you need the recipient email address to verify the email forwarding option, which tweetymail won’t do.

If you wanted to get notifications by email and fully interact on twitter, you can also set that up in tweetymail but you will need that person to set it up for you to get your notifications to your onboard email account. Tweetymail has options to still interact by email but I didn’t want to set that up.

The only thing that worked was the update Facebook option. All of my friends were very envious of my status updates. Sometimes it would send half completed status updates though. Just to check, you may have someone back at home to check your status updates to make sure they make sense.

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