Send email. Receive text.

Email-to-Text is a way to convert a standard email into a text message delivered to your phone. You send an email to a designated address and it arrives as an SMS, MMS, or iMessage — no apps, APIs, or code changes required. The cell phone carriers used to offer this service (vtext.com, txt.att.net, tmomail.net), but they've all been shut down or deprecated. text.email is the modern, drop-in replacement.

text.email turns emails into iMessage, SMS, or MMS alerts. Send an email from your apps, devices, or inbox and receive a message on your phone.

You can test text.email for free, but ongoing use requires a paid plan. Free testing is limited to prevent abuse and to make sure the service is used for legitimate alerts and notifications. You can see available plans on our Pricing page.

No. text.email is for alerts, notifications, and test messages only. Sales pitches, marketing campaigns, and promotional messages are not supported and will be rejected. Use it for messages such as server alerts, security notifications, backup failures, and on-call paging. See the examples on the homepage for more ways to use text.email.

text.email is designed for alerts and notifications, not person-to-person texting or casual conversations. It works best when an app, device, server, monitoring system, or email rule needs to send an important alert. It should not be used for marketing, promotional messages, spam, or bulk texting.

One account works well if you manage texting for all of the organizations and want a single point of billing with one credit card. This is a good fit when the same account settings apply to every organization and you are happy to manage their activity and reports together.

Create a separate account for each organization if they need to operate independently. Separate accounts let each organization use its own credit card, manage its own settings, and log in to see only its own messages and reports. Each account has its own billing and usage, so this is also the better choice when organizations need to pay their own bills or keep their activity private from one another.

Yes, if your phone number has iMessage enabled. iMessage supports numbers worldwide, including Australia, India, and the U.K. SMS and MMS are available for U.S. and Canadian numbers only. See how to send an iMessage, including how to format an international number.

Because getting your app, device, or software to send emails is easy but getting it to send an SMS is hard. Sending an SMS directly involves registering for a number, complying with regulatory agencies, and figuring out how to call an SMS API.

Yes. The text.email API lets you send SMS, MMS, and iMessage alerts from your own apps and scripts. For most users, using the API isn't necessary. You can simply send an email to your text.email address to deliver a message to your phone, with no code or API integration required.

If you want to integrate the API, create an API key in Settings → API keys and see the API documentation for instructions and examples.

Because in 2025, the major U.S. mobile providers shut these services down. Text.email is a replacement for AT&T’s txt.att.net, a replacement for T-Mobile’s tmomail.net, and a replacement for Verizon’s vtext.com.

Sending to your-number@text.email is just for fast, anonymous testing. If you create an account, you’re assigned a subdomain like “zebra”. (You can also edit your subdomain.) So you should then send emails to your-number@zebra.text.email. That way, all of those messages will be tied to your account. Keep your subdomain private. If you send to your-number@text.email, those messages will not be tied to your account and your tests will show on our homepage.

That counts as 5 messages, assuming one message is sent to each recipient. Usage is counted per recipient, even when your software sends the same notification to everyone in one email.

If a longer notification is split into multiple SMS messages, each part counts separately for each recipient. For example, a notification split into 2 SMS messages and sent to 5 recipients counts as 10 messages.

Yes. In your account settings, you can choose which elements of the email (subject, body, from, and more) are used and create your own message format. For long or messy messages, you can also use the AI Summary feature to automatically turn the email into a concise text focused on the important details.

SMS and MMS use a sending number chosen for your delivery route, such as a toll-free number or a 10-digit long code (10DLC). That number can change if your routing changes.

iMessages come from the iMessage sender configured for your account or selected by the iMessage address you use.

Replies to iMessages sent through text.email are matched to the original message and forwarded by email.

For SMS and MMS, text replies are forwarded by email when you use our reply-enabled 888-number route. Other sending routes and anonymous SMS tests may not support replies.

Yes! Send to +country-code-and-number@your-subdomain.i.text.email, using your account’s subdomain. Or save the recipient in Settings → iMessage Numbers to keep using your existing email addresses. The recipient’s phone number must have iMessage enabled. Explore email to iMessage.