Last year, I wrote about a service called Group2Call that I was using to send homework reminders via SMS to my students. It worked great but now that I’m in a public school, it was going to be too costly to continue. After fits and starts, I’ve finally found a solution that works for me: sending email that gets transmitted as a text message.
Here’s how you can set it up:
- Get your students to give you their phone number and carrier’s name (MetroPCS, AT&T, Sprint, etc).
- Find out the email-to-SMS gateway addresses for the carriers on your list. For your convenience, I’ve included the ones I’m using below.
- Send an email in the usual way, but to your student’s SMS email address. Keep messages under 160 characters because that’s the limit for text messages. Don’t forget to trim your signature!
Email to SMS gateways for several major mobile carriers:
| Metro | “@mymetropcs.com” |
| AT&T | “@txt.att.net” |
| Verizon | “@vtext.com” |
| Tmobile | “@tmomail.com” |
| Sprint | “@messaging.sprintpcs.com” |
Wish me luck.
