Email to text message?

[nilanjan.palit-ral2JQCrhuEAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Palit, Nilanjan)]

I used have a pager with a data plan where I could send emails to my pager. This was awesome, because I added email-on fail-or-success capability to my jobs that run for a long time. It was really nice, since if my job that I submitted before I left work crapped out after a few hours due to some reason, I'd get a page telling me that; I could then log in at night, fix the issue & restart the job with the results waiting for me next morning. In other words, it improved my throughput.

I no longer have that pager (it was company issued & I no longer have a "business need"). I do have a personal cell phone without a data plan (yes, there are still folks out there without Blackberries & iPhones), but can & do receive text messages on my cell phone.

I Googled and found some email-to-text email addresses that purportedly will send your text message as email. I tried the one for my carrier (Tracfone) and sent an email to the address (<phonenumber>@<some_sms_host.carrier>) -- the message did not bounce back, nor did I ever get a text message on my cell. I kept the message deliberately short ("test") to make sure it was within reasonable text message size limits.

So the question is: has anyone used this capability ever? If so, what cellphone carrier did you have? I'm trying to figure out whether there is a basic technical issue or a carrier-specific issue to not being able to do this.

Thanks,

-Nilanjan