Send Email Messages to Mobile Phones

Cellular carriers provide a service that many people are unaware of — the ability to send email to a cell phone. In other words, this is how to send a text message from email. Carriers assign an email address to each phone number utilizing a format that is specific to each carrier.  Using this format you can compose email or text messages with Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail or other email programs and easily send your email message to the cell phone of a person or a group of people.

Send Email to Cell Phone – Benefits

Email to text functionality may appeal to someone who does not have a full QWERTY keyboard on their phone but is frequently in front of a computer. Typing on a standard keyboard and sending a message from an email program can have some efficiency pluses over many mobile phones. Using email to reach mobile phones is also great for people who need to send text messages to a group of people.
With an email program you can quickly type your 160 character message, add multiple recipients for the message and quickly reach a group of people via a text message. An added benefit with email to text is that email messages sent to a phone also generate an easy to recall record of the message in the email Sent Items folder.
There is no special add-on or plug-in required for the sender but any message recipient will need to have text messaging enabled on their phone. Text messages are limited to a 160 character maximum so if you are using a signature block in your email be sure to remove it from your message. Phones only support plain text messages and many people send email messages in HTML format. This is not a problem as the carriers automatically convert messages to plain text.

How To Send A Text Message From Email

As an example, to send email to a cell phone with a Verizon account you would use the “@vtext.com” extension in the email address. The email address would look something like  4151112222@vtext.com. Below are the email address formats for several large cellular carriers:

Verizon –    “phonenumber@vtext.com”  or 4151112222@vtext.com
AT&T –     4151112222@txt.att.net.
Nextel –      4151112222@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint –      4151112222@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile – 4151112222@tmomail.net

Normal text messaging rates will apply to people who receive email messages. Recipients can respond just like they would to a standard text message from another mobile phone.