Work mobile and personal mobile mess :(

Use Case

I have a personal mobile and now the company has provided me a work mobile. This can’t be a dual SIM phone due to some security reasons. Since I can receive the work emails on this new mobile only, hence I have to carry this mobile. I don’t want to tell my friends/family this new work number because the work numbers keep changing depending upon the offers company gets from various providers. So it’s better for them to just know my personal number. That is convenient for them. So that means I will have to carry both the mobiles now because my friends/family will call me at my personal number but official emails will be received on the office mobile.

I don’t want to carry two mobiles, that’s a pain. There are four primary use cases for a personal mobile, that I want to solve on the work mobile.

  1. Incoming Calls [Your family will call you on personal mobile, so need to receive those calls on work mobile]
  2. Incoming SMS [All the OTP, Banks SMS will reach at personal mobile, but you need them on work mobileas well]
  3. Outgoing SMS [Sometimes banks will ask you send an SMS from the registered mobile number, which will be your personal number. So you will have to send an SMS using your work mobile that appears to have come from personal mobile]
  4. Outgoing Calls [Sometimes banks will ask you to call from the registered mobile number, which will be your personal number. So you will have to call using your work mobile that appears to have come from personal mobile]

Solution

Let’s try to solve each use cases.

  1. Incoming Calls - I can keep my personal phone at home and use the career’s call forwarding feature to forward the calls from my personal phone to this new phone. Easy !!
  2. Incoming SMS - . It seems they can not be forwarded. At least from what I know at this instant. I can use a GSM board and can connect that board to Raspberry pi. I can also use some linux library like gammu to poll for the new SMSes. Once I get an SMS, I can pull that SMS and send myself an email. That will work. Not too complicated!!
  3. Outgoing SMS - Again the above setup that we used for Incoming SMS can work. I can mail myself with a subject like ‘SMS-’ and mail body can have the SMS content. A program will keep polling the mail directory for that subject. Once it gets a new message, gammu library can be used to send that SMS out from my personal phone. Again Not too complicated!!
  4. Outgoing Calls - Now this is tricky. I am thinking about running some sort of program on the pi so that I can to my pi. Skype sort of thing. Then somehow if I can create a tunnel between my office phone, personal phone and the caller. humm!!

Setup Steps