I recently found out that you can send an email to a mobile number (e.g: [number]@[provider].com) for free in a lot of countries which is cool!
Unfortunately I live in Australia and my mobile provider doesn't allow free Email to SMS so I can't test it at present.
Has anyone worked with this sort of thing before? In an email there is a subject and a message. Do both of these get translated into the SMS or is it just the subject or message?
Thanks for your help!
It works for most carriers in Canada and USA that I have tested. Subject isn't passed, only the message and on some carriers / phones the "Sender" shows the email it came from and on others it just shows a random string of characters. Usually this makes replying not possible as well as telling where the message came from.
For me (on AT&T) the subject is preserved. The iPhone will actually display it with a linebreak, though in older versions it used to have
Subject: Hello
Message: This is a test SMS.
That's definitely one of the more interesting things carriers support. Another drawback, however, is that you need to know which carrier a number you're sending SMS to belongs to, let alone controlling the format of a text message.
The limitations are well described: Limitations on SMS messages sent using free email->SMS gateways
If you use a third-party SMS gateway provider, you may be able to bypass the carrier lookup issue and have more flexibility. (e.g., Email and SMS gateway using Plivo and Mailgun API). I work at Plivo.
