texting without a cell phone

[Jim Janney]

I've discovered that I need to be able to receive text messages:
important, timely things like "no rehearsal tonight". This would be
easy if I had a cell phone, but I don't. The guy who sends them just
has a list of phone numbers in, I assume, his cell phone.

A little preliminary browsing shows that if I knew his cell phone
provider I could send text messages by going to a web page or sending
email to the right address, but I need to receive them, preferably as
email. Is this even possible?

[s***@xmission.com]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:57:26 -0700, in xmission.general, Jim Janney

Post by Jim Janney
important, timely things like "no rehearsal tonight". This would be
easy if I had a cell phone, but I don't. The guy who sends them just
has a list of phone numbers in, I assume, his cell phone.
A little preliminary browsing shows that if I knew his cell phone
provider I could send text messages by going to a web page or sending
email to the right address, but I need to receive them, preferably as
email. Is this even possible?

It is, often. I've had good results exchanging email-SMS with Verizon and
T-mobile numbers. I don't know if you can submit an email address to a
service that expects a phone number. All I've done is send email to an SMS
gateway and received a reply. AFAIK nobody has been able to originate an
SMS message from a phone to my email, but that may be a matter of competence
on the cellphone end.

At some point I found this list of gateway addresses for various SMS
providers. I don't remember where I got it nor how much of it still works
(except that the vtext.com and tmomail.net ones still do), but here it is:

Email-SMS Gateway Addresses
Former AT&T Wireless aaa-xxx-***@mmode.com
Cingular aaa-xxx-***@mobile.mycingular.com
Metrocall aaa-xxx-***@page.metrocall.com
Nextel aaa-xxx-***@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint PCS aaa-xxx-***@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile aaa-xxx-***@tmomail.net
Verizon aaa-xxx-***@vtext.com
ALLTEL aaa-xxx-***@message.alltel.com