Back when I started this site (many beers ago), I highlighted a tip that allows you to send text messages from email for free. At the time, this was a money saver, with how people used their phones – texting wasn’t cheap and you could send an email from a desktop and save the mobile text message fee with your wireless carrier.
It was a nice little money saving tip at the time, but the way people use their phones today is now completely different, so it’s not quite as relevant. People may be sending text messages via email, but they are doing it from their mobile phones, if at all. And text messages today are cheap. Many of the cheapest data plans come with unlimited text messages built in to the plan.
However, data is not cheap (check out my article on how to cut data usage on iPhone & Android). And, with free text messaging, one might find it beneficial to do the reverse today – send text messages to email.
Learning how to send text messages to email can come in handy in a number of scenarios:
- you want to save money on data by not accessing your web browser
- you want to send yourself a notification or reminder
- you know someone’s email but do not know their phone number
- the recipient does not have a mobile phone but does have email
- the recipient checks their email much more frequently than text messages
- the recipient wants you to send an email and not a text
- the recipient will need to send a detailed response from a desktop vs a text from a phone
- it’s not an urgent message
How to Send a Text Message to Email
If you have a phone with SMS (Short Message Service) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), then you can send a text to email. SMS is basic simple text messaging and MMS is the next level up (can include photos, video, or audio).
Here are the steps on how to text to email:
- Turn on your text messaging application (it’s the white bubble icon with a green background on iPhone or blue bubble icon with white background on Android)
- Enter the recipient(s) email address instead of their phone number
- Compose your text
- Hit the send button
It’s really that simple. Your carrier will convert the text message to an email.
Much simpler than sending a text from email, which requires a carrier specific domain at the end of the number (instructions on how to do that are linked to in the article mentioned at the top of this article).
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I like to forward a copy of my texts to my email account. However, that means that I have to manually enter my email address every time. Apparently, only phone numbers can be automatically inserted when I do a search of my contacts. Is there any way that I can get my email address to come up automatically when I want to forward a text message?
When I try to send an SMSor MMS to my gmail account and put my email address in the To: line, it invariably send the message back to my iPhone number and not to my gmail account. What do I need to do? Thanks
David
Someone,is sending text messages to someone’s I pad it must be don wood he uses the yahoo mail! since he knows hiroo phone number!
In your original article about how to send SMS messages, you gave the addresses for the various phone carriers. I would like to send MMS messages in the same way. Do you have the list of the carrier addresses for MMS? I found a few, but if you have them all and would post them it would be appreciated. Thanks
Got a question about sms.
Im new at this. so I hope you can figure this out.
My therapist sends out text messages for reminders for appointments. But it give a 5 digit code number and says confirm appt. reply yes then gives time and date of appt. So my question is do I put in the 5 digit number and put yes then send. or do i just type in yes then send it. Reason im asking because I just typed in yes then send button and it came back saying could not complete it.Im confused.
How do I send 200+ texts from one contact to my email all at the same time I want to save them, at the same time clear up space on my phone
Tiffani,
If you are on android I highly recommend h SMS Backup + by Jan Berkel. I have been using it for five or more years. Once set up it makes a backup in your Gmail account of sms mms and call logs. Then you can delete or reset your phone and never worry about loosing any texts.
Hope this is it
Unfortunately, G.E. Miller, this doesn’t work as advertised.
Dan, I just tried the steps that G.E. Miller gave here in this articles, and in fact they do work. I wrote 3 texts from my I-phone to my husbands Android and it worked perfectly. First time we looked we kind of were disappointing that didn’t show up on the inbox, however we check on our spam box and there they were. So, next time you tried to check your Spam Box, and follow instructions it is as simple as it is described here.
Thank you Kay
Great tip, thanks
I would love to send and receive txts via email since Bell charges me cell data every time the kids send me videos and photos. I have the cheap old lady plan. But I think I’m missing something here. At present I am testing sending a photo to email but it just keeps saying sending. It will send when I turn cell data back on but then there’s Bell waiting with their hands out.
Family texts that I want to send to others
I can no longer do as I used to! This is very
Unfortunate as I do NOT want to try to
Send ian email that is my words & NOT the family member that sent text!
PLEASE TELL ME WHY I NO LONGER CAN DO THIS AS COuLD until LAST MONTH OR TWO‼️ THANK YOU❣️
We’ve been using google voice for 7 years. It didn’t get renewed in time and google won’t let me reclaim it. We need a number ( preferably free) That a text can be sent, but only to an email. Just like google voice? Any ideas?