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How can I use my laptop to send an email that arrives as a text message (SMS) on a smartphone in the United States - for free?
As I understand it, you send the email to a gateway address that has the format
(recipient's-phone-number)@(gateway-domain-for-recipient's-phone-carrier),
so to an address such as
1234567890@tmomail.net
If it arrives as an SMS, then presumably when it does it has a sender's phone number in its wrapper, and presumably the phone company that operates the recipient's phone charges them according to what country that number is based in and what the charges are for receiving SMS messages from that country according to the customer's contract.
So how can I find out what country that number IS based in, without doing this in practice? And if it is a country for which the receiver gets charged for receiving SMS, what do I have to do so that they will receive the SMS for free?
4There is no fixed service for this it depends on thee carrier. By knowning which country the carrier operates in you will know what country he is in? He will only receive free SMS if that's covered by his mobile plan. So you would have to know the mobile plan of your target. Oh and SMS are limited to 140 (?) characters. Longer text will be split and incur additional fees. – Seth – 2018-01-31T11:35:41.293
Thanks. The recipient is in the US and uses a US number and carrier. So in effect sending a (sufficiently short) email to the address formed as described ensures that they will be charged as if the SMS originated in the US, their home country, regardless of where I am in the world or how I get online with my laptop? – None – 2018-01-31T11:46:53.733
Probably not. if they're on vacation outside of the US they will likely be charged extra. As it is a service provided by the carrier whatever rules they have in place apply. But it won't matter from where you connect to the internet. With your example check their actual information page on the topic. As mentioned keep in mind that this might be different for each carrier!
– Seth – 2018-01-31T11:50:12.210Tip: when sending SMS in this manner be certain you are sending plaintext (not HTML) email without signatures etc. Also I believe that your recpient will NOT be charged extra if the email originates from outside the USA. The senders phone number is NOT in the wrapper, on my carrier (not tmo as in your example) the SMS arrives "From" the email address that sent it. – Tyson – 2018-01-31T12:59:57.090
It's not about whenever the sender is outside the US but if you as the recipient are outside of the US you might have to pay roaming charges (at least that would likely be the case in my country). – Seth – 2018-01-31T13:19:12.640
FWIW I don't live in the US. – None – 2018-01-31T19:32:17.523