Email to text message?

[jay-R5TnC2l8y5lBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org (jay-R5TnC2l8y5lBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org)]

I have used the email to text on most of the major providers, sprint, verizon, tmoble, and probably others.  There are two main issues I ran into:

1. Finding out what provider to email, and their proper address..  Usually not that difficult, but problematic for resellers, as you are likely experiencing.

2. The phones capabilities to handle it.  This should really only be a problem on older phones, but not all phones will handle a converted email gracefully.  I'm not sure on the specifics but its not exactly a strait conversion like you would expect.  There can be issues with contact and reply information, that confuses the phone itself.  My old verizon phone would not pick up the "header" information properly.  It would just dump it into the message section, which obviously made for some issues...

Its possible your problem is the phone itself, though not as likely as an adress issue.

------Original Message------
From: Palit, Nilanjan
Sender: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
To: BLU
Subject: Email to text message?
Sent: Oct 15, 2009 1:35 PM

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


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