All major mobile carriers in the United States offer a Short Message Service (SMS) gateway. This is a technological bridge that enables one form of communication (email) to meet the technical requirements of another form of communication (SMS).
Email to Text and SMS in Outlook
One of the typical applications of the SMS gateway is forwarding email to a mobile device and vice versa. The gateway platform manages the necessary protocol mapping to bridge the gap between SMS and email systems.
An email message that goes through an SMS gateway (also called an SMS aggregator) is limited to 160 characters, so it will likely be split into multiple messages or truncated if it is longer than that limit. As a result, the recipient may receive your message in two or more text messages, and not necessarily in the order in which you typed the content. If the email is longer than 160 characters or is an image, video, or recording, send it via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which can handle longer messages, rather than SMS. Emailing a text message that originates from a mobile device and goes through an SMS gateway to an email address should work fine, as emails do not have a character limit.
Most major mobile carriers offer an SMS and MMS gateway. Typically, the mobile carriers use a mobile number plus an email domain to route email messages through their SMS gateway. For example, if you are sending an email to a Verizon Wireless mobile device, you would send it to the mobile number plus "@vtext.com." If the mobile number is 123-456-7890, you would send the email to [email protected].
