Receive Email Via SMS

If you look more closely, you'll see that the message comes from an email address that contains a mobile phone number. If you reply to this message or simply send a new message to that address, you will receive it on the phone as an SMS message. This feature is known as an email-to-SMS gateway.

Almost all wireless operators offer this kind of gateway at no extra charge beyond regular SMS subscription or per-message charges. An alternative way to send SMS messages via the wireless operator is to submit the message and target phone number to a web-to-SMS web form typically available on the operator's consumer portal web site once you log in.

Table below shows the web form and gateway email addresses for popular wireless operators in the U.S. If your operator is not in this table, you can typically call the operator's technical support to find out its gateway email address. This way, you can get your email messages delivered to almost any phone as SMS messages.

Nextel
http://messaging.nextel.com/
@messaging.nextel.com

SprintPCS
http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/
@messaging.sprintpcs.com

AT&T Wireless
http://www.mymmode.com/messagecenter/
@mobile.att.net

Cingular
http://www.cingular.com/sendamessage
@mobile.mycingular.com

Verizon
http://www.vtext.com/
@vtext.com

T-Mobile
http://www.t-mobile.com/messaging/
@tmomail.net

In addition to the operator gateways, other commercial email-to-SMS gateways interoperate with multiple operators. For instance, a service called Teleflip (http://www.teleflip.com/) forwards any message sent to the address @teleflip.com to the target phone number as an SMS message (this service works only in the U.S.).

The SMS message is limited to 160 characters. You cannot send long messages or message attachments to a phone via SMS.

Since SMS messages cost money to send and receive, it is crucial that wireless operators incorporate some security measures into the SMS-to-email gateway to prevent spam. As a result, you cannot send more than 10 messages in a short period of time (typically several minutes) via the gateway. To send many SMS messages from the PC or a backend server to a phone.