Texting (2003 SP2)

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Is it possible to use Outlook to send a text message to a mobile phone? How?

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Sprint PCS subscribers can be reached using an address in this form: 8005551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com (but whoever is sending me strings of gibberish, please stop!).

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Andrew

I completed an SMS project for my company last year. We bought in an SMS gateway as an extension to our network ( it was in fact a PC with the SMS software on it)

It was as simple just to create an email to 07700000000@mtsmsgateway.co.uk wgere the number is the mobile number. Obviously the message and subject had to be no longer that 160 characters including spaces. Alternatively there are providers of this service on the web in which you can buy in a set amount of texts that you can send.

So the answer is yes, but you have to buy in the service or hardware.

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Short answer, yes.

I think there are a couple of other Loungers who know this stuff better than I do, but here’s what I know. In the US with Verizon the default is the phone number (only numbers, no spaces, parens, or dashes) followed by ‘@vtext.com’. Verizon also allows you to set up a ‘*@vtext’ email address so you can be texted. Here’s more info on Verizon, I think each service should have it’s own version of this information, but YMMV depending on the service. Later model web-capable phones may also have an email client and email support built-in, here is Verizon’s list of supported phones, mine is too old. (I’m not a salesman for Verizon, it’s just the only service I know! ). HTH.

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Are you saying that you have to set this up with your mobile phone provider, or that you have to know the provider that your addressee uses? In other words, in your example is Verizon your provider or the addressee’s?

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Verizon is my provider, I tested from my Outlook to my cell phone using both ‘999999999@vtext.com’ and ‘myname@vtext.com’ addresses. So you’ll need to know:

1. if your recipient has etext capabilities, which may mean knowing
2. the recipients service and
3. what the recipients services etext domain is, and finally
4. if the recipients username is the same as the cell number, which isn’t for certain but would be the way to bet

The only part that I had to set up (online) with Verizon was my choice of a username different from my cell phone number.

Does this help?

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I’m assuming that my recipient has texting capabilities. If he/she doesn’t then my message will presumably bounce and I don’t care, as long as I am notified of that. There’s no way I will know the recipient’s service or their etext domain or their username. All I will have will be their cell phone number, which should be enough.

I can’t believe this service is as primitive as you are implying. I have friends in Europe who text each other all the time, and all they need is the cell phone number of the person they want to send a message to. They don’t even need to know which country their recipient lives in or is currently in. It works continent-wide, and also in Australia and good chunks of Asia.

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Hi Andrew,
It is true that texting is as simple as knowing the other person’s cell (mobile) phone number, if you are texting from a cell phone. If you are trying to send a text from Outlook, at some point you need to convert from an email to SMS format. This either requires you to have software to do the conversion or to use a service that does the conversion for you. This is as true in Europe as anywhere else. You may well find that there is equivalent software available in the US to that which Jezza mentioned, but I am assuming when I say that, that text messaging works the same way over there as it does in Europe.
HTH.

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I understand that you need to convert from an email to SMS format. Why is that so hard? I can do it from Yahoo!, http://mobile.yahoo.com/sms/sendsms%5B/url%5D, but that’s a pain. I just want to do it from Outlook. My ISP should be able to convert seamlessly to SMS, but their tech support couldn’t even understand my question . Outlook should be able to send directly to a designated SMS server if the ‘To:’ field is formatted like a phone number.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if a standard for sending text messages by e-mail will be developed (or perhaps one standard in North America and another one in the rest of the world), but at the moment it’s not there yet, so there is no way that Outlook could send text messages to arbitrary cell phone numbers.

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If there’s no standard how does Yahoo send a text message to a mobile phone without knowing who the carrier is? And how is it that I can send a text message from my mobile to any mobile phone in the world without knowing who the recipient’s carrier is?

I know, I know; this is not a text message forum, so maybe you should be treat these as rhetorical questions.

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My previous reply was probably not entirely accurate. The point is that there is no universal mail-to-sms service, just like there is no universal mail-to-fax service, as Rory pointed out. It is not reasonable to demand that Outlook “should” be able out-of-the-box to send text messages to cell phones or fax messages to fax devices.

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> If there’s no standard how does Yahoo send a text message to a mobile phone
> without knowing who the carrier is?

I think they’ve wired their web site to a mobile phone. Maybe two to provide for redundancy.

But seriously, the phone number is the only address needed once you get “on” the (mobile) phone network. They must have a gateway of some kind. Maybe if you ask, they’ll tell you what it is? Or they might have an add-in that lets you hook in to Yahoo! mobile from your desktop…

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Yahoo is partnered with SBC/ATT as their ISP so they can send text messages through the ISP directly to a cellular number. It isn’t the same thing at all as sending from Outlook.

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Outlook should be able to send directly to a designated SMS server if the ‘To:’ field is formatted like a phone number.

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Why? It would be nice if it did, but why should it – that is not what it was designed for. At the end of the day, Outlook simply sends messages to a server, whether internal or external. All your message routing, conversion etc. is handled by your ISP (and, to some extent, your internal IT department). I suspect it would be possible, as long as you had an SMS server, to create either a server rule or add-on that would do this for you but, as Hans said, there is no unified standard for it anyway. Given that Outlook still does not even have any native fax capabilities, and you have to get additional software for that, it’s hardly surprising that it doesn’t have built-in SMS ability!

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Well, Outlook wasn’t originally designed to use HTML format either, but things change, new technology comes along and people have to adapt. Texting was almost unheard of a few years ago but now it’s common. Fax?

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Just FYI, this page seems to confirm that you would need to know the cell phone provider of the recipient in order to do this. (I guess that, in some ways, this may help to deter people from spamming cell phones.)

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The rest of Europe seems to have a totally different perspective on the commercial aspects of SMS.
For example, I have a Czech SIM card. Anyone – and I mean literally anyone with web access – wanting to send me an SMS simply goes to the correct page on their website, enters the number and message and clicks send. Up to 50 times a day.
With my UK SIM, I can’t even send one to someone else on the same network without my registering and logging in. It is so complex I just don’t bother.

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Andrew, as I said, there other Loungers who know more about this than me, I was explaining my experience to you. I’ll be happy to find out that email texting from an email client in the US to a cellphone with a US service provider is much simpler than my experience and Jefferson’s would indicate. If you find a simpler way, please post it back to this thread so I can learn from your experience.

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I had totally forgotten that I was looking into this last year and had come across Mediaburst.
I never progressed it beyond looking at the How’s and What’s, but it did occur to me that if there was an easier and/or cheaper method, they probably wouldn’t have much in the way of customers!

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