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Is there a web application that will let me send SMS email? Some services don't seem to support receiving normal email.

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    Do you mean an email to SMS gateway ?
    – phwd
    Jul 30, 2010 at 10:43
  • SMS is completely different from email so please make your question clearer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sms
    – citadelgrad
    Jul 30, 2010 at 16:59
  • @phwd, @citadelgrad: I hadn't heard of this before I saw this webpage; billmonk.com/about/sms
    – Casebash
    Aug 1, 2010 at 3:56
  • The title seems to ask "how can I send an SMS from a web app using a browser" which is a good question. However, maybe that's not the question at all...
    – Thufir
    Dec 6, 2012 at 22:16
  • @Casebash, link down.......
    – Pacerier
    May 22, 2014 at 11:17

2 Answers 2

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Only the cellular phone carrier can decide whether you can send SMS via email or not. Here's how to reach people on the most popular carriers:

T-Mobile: [email protected]
Virgin Mobile: [email protected]
Cingular: [email protected]
Sprint: [email protected]
Verizon: [email protected]
Nextel: [email protected]

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number

Source

If you have some programming skills, you could make use of an SMS API (such as ZeepMobile or Twilio) and build a database associating emails to an SMS phone number. Then you could send emails to "[email protected]". The app would receive the email and redirect the message to the appropriate phone number.

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  • if he meant this then you can use Textie on your iPhone
    – phwd
    Jul 30, 2010 at 18:37
  • Sorry, the question wasn't the clearest. This is what I meant by SMS email
    – Casebash
    Aug 1, 2010 at 3:57
  • @Casebash, simply sending an email to that address doesn't work? Does the service reply with some kind of error message?
    – mbillard
    Aug 1, 2010 at 11:39
  • I'm not sure what happened, testing again
    – Casebash
    Aug 3, 2010 at 0:34
  • Actually it does seem to accept normal email, just really slow about it!
    – Casebash
    Aug 5, 2010 at 2:31
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I wouldn't recommend using the email to SMS function most carriers provide for 3 reasons: (1) the email address seem to change over time (I've had mine change with my carrier a few times) and (2) some carriers charge to receive email to SMS messages and (3) it's annoying to read, since I know some of them require you to respond with "Read" or similar before seeing the who message.

I've been using Twilio for voice and I've been quite impressed. I'm sure their SMS system isn't much different. You also wouldn't need to have much programming knowledge, although it would be a good idea to provide security.

There is also a similar quesiton on Pro Webmasters.

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  • But twilio is considered expensive isn't it?
    – Pacerier
    May 22, 2014 at 11:19
  • I would consider $0.0075 per message to be fairly cheap (twilio.com/sms/pricing) although there are probably cheaper ones out there, but being that it's so easy to setup I'd say it probably saves that amount of $$.
    – Darryl Hein
    May 22, 2014 at 16:46
  • Hmm, considering the charge is per SMS, that's actually pretty expensive. If you send 20k SMSes per day, that's already costing ~$5k per month.
    – Pacerier
    May 22, 2014 at 16:49
  • And there are cheaper options? 20k is a lot of messages!
    – Darryl Hein
    May 22, 2014 at 20:29
  • A normal client subscription plan would give 1k free SMSes for a mere $30 per month, costing us just $600 for 20k (10x cheaper than $5k)...
    – Pacerier
    May 22, 2014 at 20:45

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