Email To Phone Detect Carrier

[Guest]

There is this site called https://www.teleflip.com/blog/services/flipout/ and probably many more site like it but the offer you send a message to them and it will go to the correct carrier. I was wondering if anyone knows how there doing this I know it cant be a gateway because that costs money. I thought they could just send out to all the carriers like xxx-xxx-xxxx@cingular.com and xxx-xxx-xxxx@vztext.com so that way its bound to hit one of them or does it really know what your using? Can anyone shed some light about how these services work, how there making money, and if there worth using?

 

 

 

[.josh]

Pretty much every cell phone in existence has an email address.  The email address is the 10 digit phone number (area code + phone number) and a specific domain name depending on the carrier.  For example, a tmobile cell phone email address would be 2106626436@tmomail.net (random number).  I haven't really tried to track down an exhaustive listing of carrier email domain names, but if you google "sms email addresses" you can quickly find a listing of the major carriers. 

 

When the carrier's server receives it, they convert it into an SMS message.  You would utilize the mail() function just like sending any other email, to send a message to that email address. I'm not sure what the technical details to what's acceptable and what's not, like what kind of headers are allowed, max message length, etc.. (and I'm sure even then it varies from carrier to carrier), but in my experience with messing around sending stuff to cell phones with different carriers, this format seems to be pretty safe:

 

$to= "2106626436@tmomail.net";
$from = "yourname@blah.com"; 
$subject = "very short text here";
$message = "No more than about 80 chars here";

mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

 

One thing I want to point out though is that when a cell phone receives a text from another cell phone, the receiver usually has an option to reply to the message.  But I have tried send SMS messages like this to 3 different cell phones with 3 different carriers and the "reply to" link on the phone is always some number code.  I'm guessing it's some kind of message# type number or id number or something, I really haven't looked that far into it.  The return address in the $from does get listed, so I was able to manually send a text message to it, though (creating a new text message).   

 

It is possible to send text messages to those "pay as you go" type phones you can buy at the store.  The trick is to figure out which carrier provides for them.  Most of those pay-as-you-go companies actually use several carriers, depending on the area/place the phone was bought at.  One way you can find out is by looking it up.  places like fonefinder.com can tell you the carrier if you put in the number.  I haven't really looked into how they do that, so I can't help you there, except to tell you a quick and dirty alternative: someone enters in the cell phone number, you email the message to every carrier on your list.  Since cell phone numbers are unique, it will just fail on all of them except the one that works (providing their carrier is on your list).   You'll have to sort out the ethics of that yourself, lol.

 

Another thing to note is that all applicable text message fees apply to the receiver. So if they get charged like 10 cents per text message, they will get charged for that.