Recently I wanted to figure out an easy and reliable way to send text messages from my computer to a mobile phone. I wanted to do this for no other reason than to just see if it works and what it out there right now! After playing around with all kinds of shady websites, software downloads, etc, I realized that there are very few options for doing this.

Recommended reading: Send free text messages online with 5 websites

In this post, I will list out the two methods that I used that are safe and that don’t require you to go through some shady third-party website. Also, half the time I used those websites texting sites, the message didn’t go through, so kind of pointless.

Send Text Messages from Computer to Phone using Email

What worked for me every time was using an email address to send a text message to the phone. It’s really simple and not very hard to remember! The email address is just different depending on which cell phone company the user is with.

Verizon Mobile Email address – <number>@vtext.com

AT&T Mobile Email address – <number>@txt.att.net

Sprint Mobile Email address – <number>@message.sprintpcs.com

T-Mobile Email address – <number>@tmomail.net

number is the 10 digit number for the user. Note that you do not need to add the 1 in the front. This should apply to all the carriers, but if you get a return email saying the message was rejected, then try it again with the 1 added on.

That’s it! This is the easiest method and works really well. You won’t have to pay anything, but the user receiving it will. Obviously you can’t spam and if you send too many texts via email, they’ll just block your email address, so use it wisely.

Send Text Messages via GMail

I’m listing this method second because it seems like it would work really well since it’s from Google, but I could not get any text messages send from my Gmail account to my AT&T cell phone! Maybe it’s just me because I can’t imagine it’s not working for everybody.

The issue also might be that it’s still a labs feature and not a full-blown permanent feature of Gmail, so that may also be why it’s a little flaky. In order to send texts from Gmail, log into your Gmail account and click on the gear icon at the top right.

Go ahead and click on Labs and then type SMS in the search for a lab box. Go ahead and Enable the SMS (Text Messaging) in Chat lab.

Now when you go back to Gmail, you will see it says Chat and SMS. 

In order to send a text, you just start typing in the contact’s name or typing in the number directly. A box will pop up on the right and you’ll see an option to Send SMS.

If you typed in the number manually, a pop up will appear asking you to create a new contact with that phone number:

Finally, a box will pop up at the bottom right where you can start sending your text messages just like normal chat.

So the way the payment works here is interesting. Basically, you start off with a credit of 50 messages. So 50 message you can send for free. When you send a message, your credit decreases by 1. However, when you receive a message, your credit increases by 5 up to a max of 50 credits.

In essence, you never have to “buy” credits. All you have to do is send a message to yourself and then reply back and you’ll get 5 credits. You are basically paying your phone company for those outgoing messages and getting the credit that way. It’s a cool way to send text messages as long as it works!

I, for some reason, keep getting a message saying “<person> did not receive your SMS”. Not sure what’s up with that, might be a bug in the system at this point, but it looks promising. If you have any other way to send messages from your computer to a phone, post it in the comments.