Did you know you can set up your email to trigger a text message to your mobile phone?

For example, let’s say you want to get an SMS text every time your mom sends you an email. Here’s what you need to do:

STEP 1: Figure out what your SMS email address is. Here they are for the top US carriers:

• AT&T: number@txt.att.net
• Sprint: number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile: number@tmomail.net
• Verizon: number@vtext.com

Don’t put any dashes or brackets in the number.

Go to Wikipedia’s list of SMS gateways for the complete list of country-wide codes (if your carrier isn’t one of the ones listed here).

STEP 2: Set up a filter or a rule either in your email software (like Outlook) or at your email provider (like Gmail).

• In Apple Mail it’s called Rules (in the Preferences).
• In Outlook it’s called Filters.
• In Google Apps and Gmail it’s called Filters and (in Settings).
• In Yahoo it’s called Filters and it’s in Mail Options > Filters.

Your rule/filter should say that every time you get an email from X address (your mom’s email), you automatically want it forwarded to X address (your SMS email address, which you figured out in Step 1 above).

That’s it!

We use this solution for our emergency emails, so that in addition to getting the emergency email in our inboxes, we also get an SMS on our cell phones. We’ve got it set up so that every time we get an email from [email protected], an SMS automatically goes to all our phones.