Add a contact for Gmail notifications

[geoclooney]

I have set up Gmail to forward emails as a text message to my Charge. Obviously the entire email doesn't come through, but there's enough there to let me know whether or not I need to open my email and read it right away.

The process works well, except for one annoying thing. The messages are delivered from an unusual address that for the life of me I can't save as a contact. The address is "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com" where the "johndoe" is my Gmail name and the number is my 10-digit phone number. I'd like to set up this contact so when I get a message it will say it's coming from "My Gmail" or something more elegant than the mess of letters & symbols.

However, when I open the message and try to find the "add sender to contacts" option, it seems I have a couple of choices:

Add "0123456789" as a contact
Add "vtext.com@gmail.com" as a contact

Those don't work. I've tried manually creating a contact with all of the johndoe... information but it doesn't allow me to either 1) put letters in a phone number field, or 2) make any address in any field greater than 40 characters.

Any idea how to make a contact out of that mess? Thanks.

 

[geochemical]

Why not just download and configure the Gmail app on your Charge, then it will automatically add contacts correctly (unless you tell it not to sync them). You can delete any you don't want on your Charge contacts.

 

[geoclooney]

Thanks for the response. The Gmail app solution didn't quite work for me. It did indeed add a contact after I received the next text notification from Gmail. I opened the contact to edit it (to change the contact name to "New Email" and there were only 3 fields in the contact. Name (it only said "johndoe+caf_" and not "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com"), Phone (which was blank) and Email (which only said "Gmail" with no @ or username). I did change the name to "New Email" but it had no effect--new text messages still came from "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com".

I tried several times to edit the contact. I made the contact's email address and IM address both "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com". I tried to paste that in as the phone number but it only pastes in the plus sign, the numerals and the two dots.

On my old phone (a feature phone Env Touch by LG) I put in the "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com" as the contact's email address and didn't have a phone number and it worked for this purpose.

This may not be possible, and I suppose it really isn't that big of a deal, but there should be a way to make it work.

 

[geoclooney]

I've been poking around with this and unfortunately haven't got it to work. I was able to create a contact on my Charge that had "johndoe+caf_=0123456789=vtext.com@gmail.com" as the phone number (by creating the contact online in Gmail then syncing to my phone). However, that didn't do it--new messages from that address aren't picked up as being from that contact.

Oddly, when I try to "reply" to one of my Gmail notifications, the phone says "Cannot send this message...Your message's recipient has bad number."

Anyone else seen this or know how to fix it?

 

[geoclooney]

Does anyone else send Gmail notifications to their Charge? Anyone been able to get the phone to make a contact out of the sender?