How to Send a Text via Email (And an Email via Text): A Simple Guide

Whether you’re in a pickle and need to reach someone quickly or you’re trying to connect with a customer through their preferred channel, sending an email to text (or a text to email) is sometimes the best solution.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do both in just a few minutes. Plus, we offer an alternative that uses APIs to scale your two-way email to text communications.

How to send an email to text

If you’ve ever found yourself in an airport with no cell phone service but with free Wi-Fi, you can imagine how useful it is to send an SMS via email.

While it’s not common for businesses to use SMS gateways to send text messages via email, this option can come in handy in a pinch. For example, you can send emergency alerts from your email directly to recipients’ phones to ensure they see them in a timely manner.

Follow these steps to send a text message (or multimedia message) from your email.

1. Find the SMS or MMS gateway for your recipient’s carrier

When you send an email to text, the email address you’ll enter in the To field consists of the recipient’s phone number and the carrier’s SMS or MMS gateway domain. For example, if the phone number is 123-456-7890 and the carrier is AT&T, the email address is 1234567890@txt.att.net.

Here are the SMS and MMS gateways for the major carriers in the US.

Don’t know the recipient’s carrier? Use a website like https://freecarrierlookup.com/ to look it up.

Tip: If you plan to send emails to text often, save each email address as a contact so you can easily access them.

2. Compose your message

Once you have your recipient’s email address ready, compose your message as you normally would. Keep in mind that the length of your message and any attachments will influence whether you send it as an SMS or MMS.

SMS vs. MMS

Most carriers have different gateways for SMS and MMS messages, so be sure to select the right one depending on the content of your message.

Not sure which one to choose? An SMS can contain up to 160 characters, while an MMS has no character limit and can include attachments, such as images or videos. Learn more about the difference between SMS and MMS.

If your message is longer than 160 characters and you send it via an SMS gateway, the carrier will most likely split it into multiple 160-character chunks. Use the MMS gateway for long messages to avoid this.

3. Send your text

When you send a text from your email, your recipient will see your email address as the sender.

If they reply to the text, you’ll see their reply in your email inbox as a new message. However, messages from SMS gateways can sometimes end up in the spam folder, so be sure to check there if you haven’t received a response.

How to send a text to email

What about when you need to send an email but all you have is a cell phone with no email capabilities? Even without the email capabilities, the process is still straightforward.

1. Enter an email address as your recipient

In your phone’s text message app, enter your recipient’s email address in the Recipient field, where you would typically enter a phone number.

2. Compose your message

Type your text as you normally would. Your carrier will convert the text message to an email.

3. Send your email

Once you hit Send, the recipient will get the text message in their email inbox. The sender will be your phone number along with your carrier’s SMS or MMS gateway domain, as we explained above, such as 1234567890@txt.att.net.

The recipient will see your text in the body of the email and as a .txt file attachment. Any multimedia elements, like photos or videos, will be in attachments.

Which method should my business use?

While the above methods are useful for one-off situations where you need a quick solution, these aren’t common methods of communication for businesses for a reason—it’s difficult to scale and automate this type of communication.

For example, you can use the email-to-text method to reach large groups, such as your employees, in an emergency situation. However, unless you already have their email addresses (phone numbers and SMS gateways) saved as contacts, it’ll take a long time to collect that information.

A better option for businesses is to leverage APIs to create a two-way email to SMS solution, as we’ll discuss next.

Use Twilio for two-way email to text capabilities

Communicating with customers on their preferred channel is an important part of customer engagement. However, it requires multichannel solutions. If customers prefer to communicate with your customer service representatives via text message, for example, you’ll need a centralized place for representatives to see incoming messages, such as a shared email inbox.

In such a use case where sending emails to SMS and vice versa is crucial, you’ll need something more robust than the options outlined above. That’s where APIs come in.

Learn how to use the Twilio SendGrid and Twilio Messaging APIs to build a custom two-way email to SMS solution for your business.