Twitter and Facebook posting while abroad

When I travel its a bit hard to get internet access.  Unlike most companies, my work specifically blocks internet access from my work Blackberry.

I had always thought it would be useful to be able to post Twitter and Facebook updates while abroad and via email would be useful.  Obviously my Blackberry has email and my work doesn't monitor my email usage (well at the moment, I wouldn't put it past them to start monitoring email traffic and account for each email sent while abroad).

So I thought if there was a way of sending updates via email from my work blackberry that would be great.  I then stumbled upon a great article from Lifehacker which pretty much dealt with what I wanted.  The article suggested two services (one for Facebook and one for Twitter), which seem to be by the same company: TheFriendMail and Tweetymail.

It seems TheFriendMail has been around for a while, while Tweetymail is their newest product.  At a basic level you would need to link your Facebook / Twitter accounts to the necessary service and provide a "linked" email address from where you would be sending your posts from.  Then whenever you send an email to the relevant TheFriendMail / Tweetymail email address they will be posted to the relevant Facebook / Twitter account.

Both services have more advanced options to get email updates on if someone comments on your status updates, etc, but these are paid for options.  I've stuck with the basic free option where I can post, as I only really use these services when I'm abroad and without internet access.

One thing that did mess me up a bit with both services was making sure the posts don't capture your auto-signature, and this varies for me each time I go away as my out of office auto-signature changes.  However I was able to tweak the settings in TheFriendMail / Tweetymail to make sure both my auto-signature and out of office are not captured in posts.