Re: Any Non-free SMS Gateways for e-mail to SMS on Wireless Carriers [telecom]

Aug 17, 2012 4 Replies

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Joseph Singer 13 years ago

While most wireless carriers have a free SMS gateway

> so you can send an SMS to a phone via e-mail, not all
> do. I.e. on Verizon where you can send an e-mail to
> snipped-for-privacy@vtext.com and it sends the e-mail as an SMS
> to the phone (at least the first 160 characters of it).
>
> I was looking for a paid service that would accept e-mail
> messages forwarded from my Gmail account and send the
> e-mail as an SMS to a phone on a foreign (non-U.S.) wireless
> carrier that lacks an SMS gateway.

Look at this and see if any of these services do what you want:

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(main website address) or maybe this:

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or this:

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Oh, and something you need to know about carrier specific gateways that use 10-digits@[mobile number gateway] is that they only let you use 140 characters rather than

160 character limit you have with a regular phone-to-phone SMS.

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tlvp 13 years ago

More to the point, I think (in theory): you *do* get 160 characters ...

*but* -- 11 of those get used for the 10-digits@ part of the address; more get used for the [mobile number gateway] part of the address; another 1-3 get used for the [space] (or [space][slash], or perhaps even [space][slash][space]) required between address and SMS body (ya never know just which).

And if you're using a "Subject:" line, every character it uses counts against your SMS body character-count.

So even a Verizontal snipped-for-privacy@vtext.com address should let at best a

139-character SMS (with no Subject: line) go through untruncated.

OK, that was in theory.

In practice: I just sent myself identical "Subject:"-less emails each consisting of five 35-character lines, each successive pair of which were separated by a terminating [CR][LF] pair, to SMS email addresses of the form 10-digit-#@tmomail.net and 10-digit-#@vtext.com.

Surprise: all 175 characters, and all 8 [CR][LF] characters, were displayed as received on my T-Mobile handset.

But on my Verizon handset, what came through was the full first four lines, with their terminating [CR][LF] pairs (148 characters there), and the first

14 characters of the 5th line (all told, 162 characters of SMS text).

So: theory and practice diverge (as usual, I suppose :-) ). HTH.

Cheers, -- tlvp

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Javier 13 years ago

You can use bulksms.com Their email gateway is easy to use. When you forward the message you need to add a password wiht the subject.

My only complain about them is that they don't let you change the sender id in the USA (I guess some goverment regulation in the USA does not allow them to do that).

Otherwise it is much more convenient than typing in the tiny cell phone keyboard.

Joseph S>

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Bill Horne 13 years ago

What does it cost?

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Javier 13 years ago

5 cents per message.

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