Comments on: Email to SMS Quickly and Cheaply?

Question: Email to SMS Quickly and Cheaply?

philsi — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:48:43 -0800

What is the best / cheapest / most reliable Email to SMS service? I want to find out when certain people email me (friends, family, work colleagues), ignoring the spam or the newletters.

I'm in the UK if it makes much difference.

I know Yahoo does this service at the moment (I use it at the moment: Gmail and Gmail for my domain forward required emails to a secret Yahoo address to then text me when I get new emails) but they're withdrawing it on 3rd April. I've found several pieces of software here but my laptops not always on, and thats the whole point of why I want it: just got in from work, going out in an hour? "Have I got an important email? No, okay, don't need to put on computer". "Ohhh crap, got email from boss, will switch on computer"

I know this won't be free, but the cheaper the better really.

Thanks for your help guys :)

By: rbs

rbs — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:29:26 -0800

fastmail will let you do this. and you could use their scripts/filters to be selective.

By: ewagoner

ewagoner — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:31:31 -0800

Just use Gmail's filters to do this. SMS is just email, so if you don't already know your sms email address, get it from your carrier and then set up filters in Gmail to forward matching emails to your sms email address.

By: mendel

mendel — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:38:56 -0800

SMS is just email

No, it isn't. But you're right that most carriers will provide an email-to-SMS gateway. Those aren't always free, though.

By: philsi

philsi — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:02:06 -0800

Ahhh thanks rbs - that looks like what I'm looking for. Do you use it / know if its any good / reliable?

ewagoner, my carrier (O2) doesn't make it exactly easy to find out my SMS email address and charges me more to receive emails on it than it costs for me to set up another service!

By: yohko

yohko — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:16:55 -0800

On some carriers you can find your SMS email by sending an SMS to your regular email address.

By: .taft

.taft — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:20:06 -0800

I second the Gmail filter suggestion. If you need to find out how to email an sms, look up your provider on this list.

By: fambizzari

fambizzari — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:26:38 -0800

If you are a webmaster with access to your own domain, you can create this yourself.

The email you receive should be piped to a script. That script would trigger the sms and do anything else you want with it (e.g. forward it to a gmail account).

If you're still trying to accomplish this, let me know.