This tutorial describes how to build an application that forwards emails to SMS using Node.js and Twilio. To start, you need to set up a Twilio account, install Node.js and npm, and create an IMAP client to receive email notifications. The application uses Express to serve as a web server, which receives the email notifications from the IMAP client and parses them to send as SMS messages. The tutorial also covers how to modify the package.json script to run both servers in one command, test the application, and handle edge cases like emails that exceed the character limit imposed by Twilio.