Instructions: Email Associations Help
Use your email from home or your mobile phone to help us locate invasive species in your area!
What are Email Associations?
Email Associations allow you to set up email accounts (either your home email address or your mobile phone's "number") to associateiate to your What's Invasive! account. This will allow you to contribute to the What's Invasive! invasive plant species documentation campaign but without having to use our Android G1 or iPhone applications.
All types of email accounts can be supported, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or your own internet service provider's email!
Additionally, this service can also support many Multimedia Message Service (MMS) enabled phones from service providers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and more. Please note that standard mobile phone MMS and SMS messaging rates will apply depending on your mobile plan!
Email From My Phone??
Indeed! Most carriers support the ability to send MMS messages (Picture and/or Video messages) to email addresses, as well as the ability to receive replies from email senders. All you have to do is create an MMS message using your phone's text or picture messaging service and type in an email address in the recipient list instead of a phone number.
How do I Test My Phone For Email Support?
Try sending a test message to one of your own email accounts. In a few minutes, a copy of your MMS message should pop up in your inbox from an address representing your phone. Use this address for setting up the email associations in the Email & Phone numbers associations page.
Next, try replying to that email you just received. If you get the replied MMS message on your phone, then congrats, your phone is capable of sending and receiving emails!
You can also contact your carrier and ask if your plan supports the sending and receiving of emails through MMS.
So, How Do I Do This?
Simple! Your observation needs two things:- A plant name in the Subject line.
- A geo-located image attached or location information in the Body of the message (described below).
If you want your submission to be automatically parsed (you can manualy do the entry later, too, described below), then you need the name of the invasive plant you've spotted with spaces removed and lowercase. For example, if you want to submit an observation of a "Harding Grass" you'd type this into the subject of your message: hardinggrass
For unknown plants, you'd type: unknownplant. Any other space-separated tags will also be saved, just not automatically parsed.
You then just email your observation (on your phone as an MMS picture message or from your computer) to:
mobile@whatinvasive.com
Actually, you don't even need those two things, but it makes life easier (see box below).
Optionally, you can also supply other values in the body of the message which follow the same format used to supply location information.
Title:"<Image Title>"
Description:"<Image Description>"
What If I Don't Have GPS?
If you don't have a GPS-tagged photo, or if you are emailing a photo from your digital camera using your computer, or if you are just making a non-photo email observation, then there are a few ways we offer to have your submission tagged with a location:- The first method of geo-tagging your submission is pretty simple. All you have to do is type is some specific text in the Body of your message which we'll attempt to parse when we receive your message. Simply enter (including quotes and a capital 'L'):
Location: "<YOUR LOCATION>"
<YOUR LOCATION> can be any parseable address or location from a street address like "1 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA" or a location like "Staples Center", "UCLA", "90034", or "Grand Canyon". When your submission gets received, we'll send you a response letting you know the geo-tagging procedure succeeded. Please note, you can't place extra quotes within the supplied location. If the process fails, you can use the second method for geo-tagging your submisison.The second method is easy, too. Just log into the website and then using the Photo Viewer or the Non-Photo Observation Viewer to add or modify the GPS information associated with the submitted observation. You can also add an image and edit some of the other parameters associated with your observations. You can correct any misspellings, delete an entry or even create a completely new entry from scratch using the Create Observation link.
