How-to: Check Your Email on your Cell Phone without a Data Plan
Posted by Jon Lee in How-to, Offtopic, tags: cell phone, email, hack, How-to, iPhone, rogers, sms
In Canada, data plan rates are through the roof. They’ve gotten a bit better recently but is still out of reach for many Canadians.
If all you need a data plan for is to check your e-mail, then maybe there is a free alternative.
Requirements
- Cell phone capable of receiving text messages (pretty much all cellphones)
- Free unlimited (or very many) incoming text messages
- A carrier that offers E-mail to SMS messaging
- An e-mail account with forwarding capabilities (pretty much all e-mail services)
WIth most cellular service carriers, receiving text messages is free and only outgoing text messages cost money. And if your provider offers E-mail to SMS, then you can take advantage of these two facts to get your e-mail on your cell phone for free!
In fact, you’ll be receiving a notification almost instantaneously (much like push e-mail) so you don’t need to be actively checking your e-mail!
Step 1: Find your carrier’s E-mail to SMS Gateway address
Most carriers offer this service which allows e-mails sent to a special e-mail address to be forwarded as a text message to your phone. For example, with Verizon, if you send an e-mail to:
9876543210@vtext.com
The e-mail will be forwarded as a text message to (987) 654-3210.
To find what e-mail address your carrier uses, check out this extensive list on Wikipedia.
Step 2: Forward your E-mail to the Gateway address
Set up your personal e-mail account to forward a copy of your e-mails to the gateway address from step 1. In Gmail, you can find the setting under Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding.
Alternatively, if you’re using Gmail, you can also set up a filter to forward only specific e-mails to your cell phone. That way you won’t get bombarded with text messages if your daily volume of e-mails is large.
And that’s it! Just two simple steps to get your e-mails on your cell phone.
Things to Note
My carrier is Rogers and they offer 1000 free incoming text messages but E-mail to SMS isn’t free. Instead, what happens is they only inform me who is sending me an email and I need to reply ‘read’ to get the content of the actual email. If I had unlimited outgoing text messages then this would essentially be free but instead it costs of 15 cents to read a message. Nonetheless, I’m happy with just knowing that I’ve received an email and who sent it.
Also, I had to send a reply of ‘Yes’ upon the delivery of the first message to subscribe to the service (subscription is free, minus the cost of sending the reply of ‘Yes’).
Finally, some carriers let you reply to e-mails or send e-mails through text messages by formatting the message in a certain way. I’ve personally never tried it but there are some basic instructions here.
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