Tutorial Thursday
So many people have unlimited SMS text messaging plans on their phones these days that a lot of services, such as Twitter, are using them as a way to notify users of updates. By doing this users get a simulated push notification experience without needing to have a push-compatible device.
The good news is that you can also use this type of system for emails, well, assuming your email service supports forwarding (such as Gmail). That’s because most cellphone carriers provide an email address that can be given out, and when an email is received they’ll convert it to a text message which is then sent to your device. We’ve got a list of common carriers that support this towards the end of the article.
Why is this so great? I’m a Gmail user that owns an iPhone, and instead of having my phone go out and check for new emails every 15 to 60 minutes I can just get a text message. If you’ve got an unlimited text message plan with your carrier you’ll likely enjoy the convenience of getting instant notifications of emails.
Setting it up is fairly easy as long as your email service supports forwarding. Since Gmail offers this feature for free we’re going to use that in our example…
–Push Gmail Using SMS Text Messages–
Login to your Gmail account, and navigate to the Settings. Under the Forwarding and POP/IMAP section you can have Gmail forward all of your emails to a specified address. This is where you can specify the email address your carrier uses for your cellphone number, and you’ll want to be sure to choose the keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox option to ensure the messages don’t get removed after being forwarded:
Note: If you don’t know the email address format used by your carrier refer to the section below that covers some of the most common carriers.
After you’ve setup forwarding any emails that are sent to your Gmail account will also be forwarded on to your cellphone via text message. The text messages obviously won’t contain the full email if they’re really long, but it serves as a good notification system.
Alternatively you can setup a Gmail filter to only forward important emails to your phone via text message.
–Email Addresses for Common Carriers–
These are the email addresses you need to use in the instructions above. Be sure to replace the “0123456789″ with your own phone number.
- AT&T: 0123456789@txt.att.net
- T-Mobile: 0123456789@tmomail.net
- Sprint: 0123456789@messaging.sprintpcs.com
- Verizon: 0123456789@vtext.com
- US Cellular: 0123456789@email.uscc.net
- Nextel: 0123456789@messaging.nextel.com
- Alltel: 0123456789@message.alltel.com
- Virgin Mobile: 0123456789@vmobl.com
- SunCom: 0123456789@tms.suncom.com
- Powertel: 0123456789@ptel.net
- Metro PCS: 0123456789@MyMetroPcs.com
If your carrier was not listed here you should check their website. The information can often be found in the help or support section.
–Overview–
Cool, huh? If you know of any other good ways to use text messages as notifications be sure to drop us a comment. And remember, you’ll probably want to stay away from doing anything like this unless you have an unlimited text message plan.
I setup my Gmail to forward to my Tmobile phone (HTC Dash) but all my emails are showing up in my phone as MMS messages, not text messages. Wonder if there is a work around for that…?
The downside of them coming through as MMS is that it takes longer to load up and also “plays” the message and takes awhile to scroll through.
there is a larger list of email addresses here: [sms411.net]
o2 uk is: @mmail.co.uk
Looks like that is the only email address they provide… so I’d venture to say that there is no workaround.
The article’s list isn’t that great, but I believe what you’re referring to is the list that someone placed in the comments.
For tmobile use tmomail.com, not tmomail.net.
Alternatively, you may prefer to use your carrier EMAIL address instead of the SMS address, for carriers for which that is provided, in that most carriers send a notification for mail received to that carrier account. One main issue using the SMS address is that long emails will often not be forwarded because they are too long to be received by the limited SMS relay. For example, I have been using the “accountname@springpcs.com” address for years now instead of the phone number messaging address, so that I am still alerted by the service – only issue is that Sprint is unfortunately discontinuing its email service at the end of this year
, which has brought me to looking for a better alternative. So definitely if anyone has another way, please let us know – I really would rather not have to buy some Push solution 
.
wow superb article
Thanks
Rogers got really smart about it about 2-3 years ago. When ever you send an email to PHONENUMBER@pcs.rogers.com they send you a text message notifying you that you’ve received an email and you have to reply with “READ” to get the actual content of the email. Sending a text makes regular charges applicable. The notification email only provides you the email address of the send so you know if it’s worth it or not.
Heres a trick I am using related to gmail and Nextel. I couldn’t find an answer anywhere so I figured this works out well. My girlfriends email at work is xxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxx.com (35 characters) Neither of my phones will recognize that many characters for an email. Programming or replying to a received text. So I went to gmail went under the filters and used the forwarding option to forward any message sent from my cell phone sms address to my g/f’s work email. It works perfectly every time!
So all I need to do is go to create a message, type in my gmail as the to and it goes to my gmail and automatically forwards it to my g/f’s work. Hope this helps someone.
What I’m really looking for is a service that will break up a msg into 160 chars each msg. It can send the first part, then say “reply with ‘more’ to receive the rest.