Sometimes Mathematica takes quite a while to finish calculations and it would be convenient to be able to move away from the computer while it is working. I was wondering if there is any "clever" hack that can be used purely within Mathematica to e-mail uptdates on the computation.

I can think of a very rough way of getting an update other than actually accessing the machine which would be by exporting some output to a file in Dropbox. From another machine connected to Dropbox I could see when the file is updated. But this seems to me like a very ugly solution.

A less ugly solution would be to write an external script, probably with python, and then have Mathematica run it at some point in the calculation. This would allow for both e-mail and text message updates (using skype or a similar service and the appropiate python modules).

Is there any way to do something similar purely within Mathematica?