I recently discovered that you can send a text message from an email… Maybe everyone knows? To be honest, I was kind of astonished. I’m not sure how actually useful this information might be, but here’s what you can do:

If you know the phone number AND the carrier of the person you want to text you can send the TEXT message from your EMAIL by addressing the email to a destination formatted as:

[phone number]@[carrier domain name]

Some of the more common carrier domain names are:

• AT&T (and Consumer Cellular) — txt.att.net
• Nextel — messaging.nextel.com
• Sprint — messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile — tmomail.net
• Verizon — vtext.com
• Virgin Mobile — vmobl.com

Of course, that list only scratches the surface, but I did find what seems to be a pretty comprehensive index here: https://avtech.com/articles/138/list-of-email-to-sms-addresses/

In practice, to send a text message to your friend at (202) 555-0192 who has a mobile plan with AT&T, put 2025550192@txt.att.net in the TO line, optionally add a SUBJECT and a MESSAGE and click send. If you have the number and domain name right, your friend will receive a text message on his phone that looks something like this:

FRM: [You]
SUBJ: [The Subject]
MSG: [The Message]

As for the number the message appears to come from, it appears to be some 10 digit number that is NOT your phone number.

If your friend decides to text back, you will receive the response in your email’s inbox. So, apparently, the originating email is part of the original transmission.

Of course, you’re probably wondering, how could I actually be certain of my intended recipient’s carrier? Well, someone’s thought of that too with this carrier from phone number lookup: carrierlookup.com

Bear in mind, it looks like that site gives you exactly ONE free lookup per day.

The usefulness of this methodology for a business purpose is probably questionable, but maybe? if you wanted to broadcast a message to employees with company owned phones, perhaps? In any case, if you find yourself in need of sending a text message without access to a phone, but access to a computer with internet, just remember this post – it could be a life saver!

Oh! Wonder where I made this discovery? Well, I found it reading Lee Dumond’s 2009 book Robust ASP.NET Exception Handling: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/robust-asp-net-exception/9780470503676/

Ryukin Limited Labs is the skunkworks where I plan to do some of the stuff I’ve been thinking about doing over the last several years, but never had the professional opportunity or fiscal justification to try. And what kind of ‘stuff’ might that be? Well, the IT kind of stuff mostly, I guess.

This blog will be an outlet for me to document my progress and to talk about what I’ve learned. Hopefully, I can provide others with insight, or, at the very least, in the absence of actual readers, these posts will provide me with an archive of resources that might be worth referring to in the future.