A Guide to Sending an Email to SMS

Despite having low open and response rates, a lot of people still prefer communicating via email. It’s fast, free, and provides unlimited opportunities. Email still has one of the highest ROIs of all mobile marketing channels.

While all this sounds pretty convincing, imagine the following situation. You’re on your laptop working and there is an urgent issue to discuss with your colleagues, who are outside the office. Calling them is time-consuming and texting them individually is a hassle. If you decide to email them, there’s the risk of their reading your message late.

Fortunately, there are browser extensions that convert any email to a text message. This easy solution requires you to download the extension and control it from your email. When you convert your email to SMS, your recipients can reply back as a text. You still receive the text on your email account, which makes it easy for you to sort out the messages.

Sending an Email to a Phone Number

There are three ways to send and receive an email to a phone number:

• Browser extension
• Telecom operator gateway
• Online platforms

Sending emails as text messages via a browser extension is quite useful, especially when you are in a low coverage zone when there's the chance of getting messages delayed or undelivered. In addition to using email-to-SMS extensions, it's also important to have a backup plan in case your SMS messages are lost or deleted by using an SMS backup app.

First, add an email-to-SMS extension to your browser. With a bit of research, you’ll find one that works best for you. Upon adding the extension, you’ll see a mobile phone symbol near the send button or subject line of the email.

Afterwards, open your email inbox and compose a message. Texts with attachments and longer than 160 characters will be converted into MMS messages.

Once you’ve written your message, click on the phone symbol. The system will open up a window for you to enter the destination phone numbers. Note that most providers will give you a room for just one or two phone numbers on their free trials.

Once you’ve added the phone numbers, click the send button, and voila—recipients will receive the email as a text message. They will see a phone number or gateway email address, depending on their telecom operator.

You can also send emails as SMS via a telecom operator gateway. First, open the email app on your phone and compose your message. Write the cell phone number of your recipient in the “To” field, then type “@gateway address” next to the phone number.

Note that gateway addresses are different for each telecom operator. To do this, you need to know which operator the recipient is using.

Sending an SMS to Email

Sending an email as a text message is also a useful feature. It can help you when you don’t have cellular service but are connected to WiFi. Just like email to SMS, you can send text messages from email. There's also a solution that allows you to send and receive text messages even when you don't have cellular service: SMS over WiFi.

Open the SMS messaging app on your phone and type your text. In the “To:” field, type the email address instead of the phone number. Send your message, and your telecom operator will convert it into an email.

Once you send the email via text message, your recipient will get it from a coded sender. Your phone number and provider gateway email will appear in the sender section.

It’s important to note that your phone needs to support not just SMS, but also MMS services to send an email by text message. If your MMS service is on but you can’t send an email, check with your telecom operator.

Forwarding an SMS to Email

The biggest advantage email has over text messaging is its flexibility. It gives users a lot of space for organizing their messages, attachments, and more. In addition, it also allows forwarding SMS to email, which makes it even more practical. If you have an important message on your phone, you can forward it to your email to keep it in the cloud.

SMS to Email for Android

Forwarding SMS to email on Android phones is pretty simple. Open the text messaging app on your phone and choose the messages you want to forward to your email. Click the “Forward” or “Share” button and select the messages. Then, enter the email address you want to forward the messages to and tap "Send."

You’ll also find several applications on Google Play to forward SMS on Android. These apps work when the phone is connected to the internet. You can set specific filters for messages that you need to forward. Some of them can even forward the text message to more than one email or phone number.

Email to SMS Services

There are dozens of great providers that offer email to SMS text services and vice versa. Their pricing is relatively similar and their services are quite similar. The main difference you might find is that some providers have their own gateway email addresses. This means that when you send an email to a phone number with these providers, you need to write the phone number and the app’s gateway instead of the telecom operator.