Technical FAQ

If you have a free account, you can send 10 total SMS messages. After 10, you must subscribe to a paid account.

Yes. You can put multiple your-number@your-subdomain.text.email addresses in the To, Cc, or Bcc line, and each of them will still receive an individual SMS.

Yes. You can change it from your account’s settings page, but once you change it, any emails sent to your old subdomain will bounce and not convert to an SMS.

In your email provider's forwarding settings, add your text.email address, such as number@sub-domain.text.email, as the forwarding destination. Replace number with the recipient's phone number and sub-domain with your account's subdomain. Your provider will usually send a verification email to that address and ask you to click a link to confirm forwarding.

If the confirmation link is missing from the text message or gets cut off, you can find it in the original email:

1. Log in to text.email and open History.
2. Find the log entry for the forwarding verification email sent by your email provider. Look for its sender or confirmation subject.
3. Click Show email to open the full source email. Find the confirmation link in the Plain text or HTML view, then open it to confirm forwarding.

text.email has special handling for Gmail forwarding confirmation links to make this process smoother. With other providers, you may need to retrieve the link from the source email in History using the steps above. Once confirmed, return to your email provider's settings to finish enabling forwarding or choose which emails to forward.

Because sending text messages like this is heavily regulated, and each country has their own protocols for allowing software to send SMS messages. We’re working on adding other countries.

With text.email, a subdomain is a word that is assigned to you when you create an account. If your subdomain is yoga, then you will send emails to your-number@yoga.text.email, for example. This is how we assign messages to the right account. Every user with text.email has a unique subdomain.

Sending without a subdomain is meant for testing only, just to show prospective users that the service works. You’re only allowed to send a few messages to your-number@text.email (without a subdomain), before your messages begin bouncing.

By default, all “from” addresses are allowed to send to your @your-subdomain.text.email address. You don’t need to configure anything. Only if you want to lock down who can send should you go to Settings and use the Authorized Senders section.

Add individual email addresses, entire domains, or both. Authorizing a domain allows every address at that domain and its subdomains. Once you add an entry, only emails whose visible “From” address matches an authorized address or domain will generate a text message; other emails are rejected. Remove all entries to allow all senders again.

See our Authorized Senders guide for setup instructions and testing tips.

We use the plain-text part of your email whenever it’s available. If your email doesn’t include a plain-text body but does include an HTML body, we’ll fall back to the HTML and convert it into SMS-friendly text.

When we convert HTML, we:

• Remove <head>, <style>, <script>, and HTML comments
• Try to remove “hidden preheader” content (best-effort)
• Turn common formatting into readable text (line breaks, paragraphs, and bullets)
• Preserve links in a compact way (for example: Reset password (https://...) when it fits)
• Strip remaining tags, decode entities, and normalize whitespace
• Try to cut off large quoted/forwarded sections

Yes — links and email addresses are allowed in text.email messages.

However, messages that contain URLs (and sometimes email addresses) can take longer to deliver because our upstream SMS providers and carrier networks often run extra automated checks on messages that look like they include clickable content. That can introduce a short delay compared to a plain text-only message.

If speed matters most, keep the message simple (no links). If you need a link, it’s fine — just expect delivery to occasionally be a bit slower.

Yes. Paid accounts can send a supported image or audio attachment directly into the recipient’s text-message conversation as an MMS. In your account settings, choose how text.email handles MMS:

• No: Send regular SMS messages and turn attachments into links.
• Auto: Send an MMS when an email contains supported media; otherwise send a regular SMS. This is the recommended setting.
• Yes: Send every message as an MMS, including text-only messages.

The supported media types are JPG/JPEG, PNG, and GIF images and WAV audio. Files must be under 225 KB; text.email may resize or compress images to make them fit.

Each MMS can contain one media attachment and up to 1,000 characters of text. If an email contains multiple eligible files, text.email selects the most significant one for the MMS; additional files are delivered as links. Unsupported formats such as PDF, MP3, and MOV are also delivered as links.

MMS is available to paid subscribers and costs an additional $0.10 per MMS. See the complete email-to-MMS guide for more details.

This can happen after we review your account activity. We sometimes move legitimate users to a different SMS provider as part of ongoing anti-spam and deliverability improvements.

When that happens, the “from” number recipients see may change, and future replies will go back through the new number. The service still works the same — it’s just backed by a more reliable routing/provider for better delivery.

When you test the service anonymously or your account hasn’t been fully provisioned and verified, we route those messages through a conservative delivery path (a lower-priority routing/provider) that helps protect carriers and reduce abuse. That path can sometimes introduce noticeable delays for test messages.

After we provision your account and verify you as a legitimate user, we typically move you to a higher-priority routing method where messages usually arrive instantly. If you still see large delays after verification, contact support with timestamps and example message IDs so we can investigate provider-level routing for your account.