How to Send Text Messages by Email for Free (Both SMS & MMS)

Did you know that you can send someone a text message via email?

Yep – it’s a great way to reach someone if you don’t have your phone as long as you know their number!

You probably get unlimited text messages so this tip won’t save you a lot of (or any) money, but it could save you time. There are a lot of cases where a business, or some other entity, is willing to notify you by email but not necessarily by text message.

In those cases, you may want to get a text message instead. Now you can, just figure out your carrier’s email address configuration to route to text messages and you’re golden!

Where to Send Your Text Messages by Email

To send a text message by email, you just need to email the carrier’s SMS or MMS email address and email your message there.

The format is the same for all of the carriers – [their phone number]@[domain] – the domain is the part that changes. It’s technically called an email gateway, in case you ever have to search for it yourself. An email gateway is an email server that filters out spam and other unsolicited email.

Here they are for some major U.S. based carriers:

Here they are for Canadian based carriers:

What is emailSMS?

EmailSMS often refers to services that companies offer to permit this type of communication within their organization. Various companies make the email gateway servers that facilitate the email-to-text-message “translation,” so to speak, but you don’t need that because the wireless carriers already do it for you.

In other words, you don’t need emailSMS because it’s already there.

Difference Between SMS and MMS?

The main difference between SMS and MMS is that SMS is for simple text messages and MMS is for longer messages that may include media.

SMS is short for Short Message Service and what we think of when we think of text messages. You are limited to 160 characters of text and longer messages will be split up into multiple text messages.

MMS is short for Multimedia Messaging Service and handles longer messages that include photos, videos, or audio.

If you are just sending text, SMS is fine. Otherwise, you need to use the MMS address if it’s available.

What happens if you send multimedia to an SMS address? It depends on the carrier but the message usually goes through without the attachment. When I tried to send an image via SMS to myself, the message went through including the filename of the attachment but the attachment was removed.

There you have it – how to send a text through email!