E-mail to SMS- Please help this desperate American! :-)

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › E-mail to SMS- Please help this desperate American! :-)

psychotropic

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Wannabe Geek

#41048 8-Sep-2009 18:49

I live in the US and have friends in New Zealand and they both have Telecom. I have a Palm Treo 800w on the Sprint network and know that we can text (or SMS as you guys call it) back and forth.

What I would love to do is be able to text them from my email. For instance, let's say my phone number is 314-555-1212 (a ten digit US telephone number). You can log into gmail or whatever email client you use and you can send an email to 3145551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com (for Sprint numbers) and I would receive it as a text message. Almost every US mobile phone company allows you to do this as a lot of you know.

Is there anyway I can do this with New Zealand Telecom numbers like where I can put some kind of NZtelephonenumber@whateversendsthistosms.co.nz and have my emails go to their phones as texts? Thanks!

nzbnw

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Spark NZ

#254130 8-Sep-2009 19:00

Telecom does offer this, but the service is not free. You also need a Telecom postpaid mobile account.

http://telecom.co.nz/etxt

nzbnw

psychotropic

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Wannabe Geek

#254151 8-Sep-2009 19:57

Aww... I knew something like that would happen to me :-(

nate

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#254382 9-Sep-2009 15:57

I believe Clickatell support email to SMS. Their rates are pretty sharp too.

Kyanar

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#254497 9-Sep-2009 19:21

Clickatell get firewalled by Telecom so often that I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. I've used them before - they resolve the issue quickly, until it carks it again a week later. Their rates are decent, but their service is awful. If you're looking to do something like this, I'd actually recommend signing up with someone like a Message Media reseller - e.g. Net24 have a plan for $10 a month +GST including 20 free messages (extras cost 17c or so).

nate

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#254716 10-Sep-2009 12:14

Kyanar: Clickatell get firewalled by Telecom so often that I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. I've used them before - they resolve the issue quickly, until it carks it again a week later. Their rates are decent, but their service is awful. If you're looking to do something like this, I'd actually recommend signing up with someone like a Message Media reseller - e.g. Net24 have a plan for $10 a month +GST including 20 free messages (extras cost 17c or so).

Really? I have a dozen clients running off them (including us) and I've never had an issue.

openmedia

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#254720 10-Sep-2009 12:30

Here is a company with a local option

http://www.bulletin.net/product-txtmessenger.html

Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat APAC as a Technology Evangelist and Portfolio Architect. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

kadillak

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#254757 10-Sep-2009 14:20

TNZ do email-to-text quite extensively and works perfectly with all the mobile operators here in New Zealand as well as 90% of the rest of the world. Basically, send the message to NUMBER@sms.tnz.co.nz and it will appear as a text on their phone.
I think there is a monthly fee of $5 + Messages. You can also set the originator to be your number/email address etc.

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psychotropic

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Wannabe Geek

#254805 10-Sep-2009 16:27

Thank you guys so much for helping me out! I'll have to look into that or just use regular SMS from my cell phone.

I just think that's so goofy that almost every carrier in North America allows for this and other parts of the world would restrict such a nifty feature. Sprint actually told me to do this for awhile before they had picturemail apps for smartphones and even sent me an email list of the SMS gateways for other carriers!

I guess spam is a worse issue in other parts of the world.

DS248

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#254812 10-Sep-2009 16:52

If you are wanting to send SMS from an internet connected PC, another option is Skype (or similar). Very simple to use with Skype & can set up so the SMS appears comes from your mobile. Limited to 160 characters per SMS. Costs Euro 0.078 (~USD 0.114) per SMS to NZ - nil fixed cost.

Edit: A possible caveat - I have ony used this to txt Vodafone mobiles. Not certain if it works with Telecom.

raytaylor

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#254912 10-Sep-2009 23:08

I think one of the reasons that the US carriers allow you to send txt's to their customers for free is they charge more for sending from the cellphone. In NZ most people are on a pricing plan of $10 txt for 1,000 or so messages which when i last checked (a while ago) was incredibly cheap compared to other countries.

Ray Taylor

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