Email to a Cell Phone

Need to send a quick message to your friend from your computer, but don't have your phone handy? Nearly all cell phones can receive email messages as text messages, as long as you send the message to their phone number using the correct SMS gateway. Some services even allow you to send multimedia messages.

Steps

  1. Determine the recipient's carrier. In order to send an email message to your recipient's phone, you will need to know what carrier they are using.
    • If you can't ask the person what carrier they are using, you can use online lookup services such as CarrierLookup.com to determine the carrier for any number.
    • You can't use your existing contacts to send messages this way unless you specifically entered in the SMS gateway domain as one of the contact's email addresses.
  2. Find the domain for your recipient's carrier. Each carrier has a special domain that you can use to send messages from your email client to their mobile phones. Note that if a carrier has two different domains available, one will be for standard text (SMS) and one will be for messages with attachments such as images (MMS). If the carrier only has one domain, you may not be able to send images. Below are a few of the more popular carriers:[1]
  3. Open your email program or website. You can send email messages to cell phones using most email clients, including Outlook and Thunderbird, as well as using nearly all web-based email services, such as Gmail and Yahoo!.
  4. Compose a new message. If you are sending the message to an SMS number, make sure that you don't include any images. Try to keep the message under 140 characters.
  5. Add the recipient using their 10-digit phone number followed by the appropriate domain. Don't include the country code or any punctuation.
    • For example, to email (123)456-7890 using T-Mobile, the address would be 1234567890@tmomail.net.
  6. Send the message. Your recipient should receive your email message after a few moments. If they are using a smartphone, the email will appear in their SMS app as opposed to their email app.

Troubleshooting

  1. Set your email message to Plain Text mode. Many email programs use HTML messages, which can cause a lot of problems for sending email messages as SMS messages. Turning off HTML can help fix garbled messages.
    • The process for this varies depending on the email program you are using. For Gmail, click the Down arrow at the bottom-right corner of the Compose window and select "Plain Text". If you are suing the Outlook email client, click the Message Options tab and select the "Plain Text" format.
  2. Keep the message short. Most cell phones can only receive messages that are 140 characters or shorter. If the message is longer, it may be broken up or may not send at all. Try keeping your messages under the 140 character limit to ensure that they are sent correctly.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.tech-faq.com/how-to-send-text-messages-free.html
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