I just launched text.email, a new service that does one thing: Turns an email into a text.

Email to SMS with text.email: Table of Contents

• Why I Built an Email-to-Text Platform
• What text.email Does
• Who text.email Is Made For
• What Are the Other Options Out There?
• Getting Started with text.email

Why I Built an Email-to-Text Platform

GMass started because I needed a tool that didn’t exist.

I wanted to email campaigns from inside Gmail; not from some external platform, not with a complicated setup, just from my inbox. There was no way to do that, so I built it.

I figured if I wanted and needed it, I couldn’t be the only one.

text.email started the same way.

When something breaks, I need to know about it immediately. Pretty much every system and app I use can send an email when that happens. But I also get thousands of emails a day and the notifications can get buried.

Texts cut through the noise.

For many years, my solution was really simple. Verizon (and all the other U.S. cell phone carriers) offered a free email-to-text service for everyone.

So I set up my alerts to send an email to mynumber@vtext.com, and it would show up as a text message.

Then the carriers killed it. Verizon shut down vtext.com. AT&T killed txt.att.net. T-Mobile deprecated tmomail.net. The official reason was spam and (because of that spam) strict new compliance rules.

I went looking for a replacement. Something simple: send an email, get a text. That was my whole requirement.

What I found instead was a bunch of marketing platforms, API-first services that meant I’d have to build an entire system, and enterprise incident management systems that were major overkill for what I needed. Nothing that just went “email out, text in” like the old gateways did.

So I built text.email.

What text.email Does

The premise is exactly what the old carrier gateways offered: send an email to yournumber@text.email, and it arrives as an SMS.

No API to integrate.

No SDK to install.

No dashboard to learn.

If your system can send an email (and virtually everything can) it can now send you a text alert. Cron jobs, monitoring tools, backup scripts, legacy systems, NAS devices, IoT sensors — anything that can trigger an email can now trigger an SMS.

You change the recipient address in your existing config and you’re done.

Who text.email Is Made For

I built this for sysadmins, DevOps teams, SREs, technical-minded founders like me, and anyone running infrastructure who needs to know when something breaks.

The kind of stuff that matters at 2 AM and can’t wait until you check your inbox.

It’s explicitly not a marketing tool or a mass texting platform. (This isn’t to send appointment reminders or promo codes.)

It’s not even a two-way communication system.

Just one-way notifications for when something needs your attention right now.

What Are the Other Options Out There?

As I researched my own solution to the “email to text” problem, I found there wasn’t something that was a 1:1 replacement for the old carrier getaways.

The options are:

• Full incident management platforms. Platforms like PagerDuty are great if you have a whole team with escalation policies, on-call rotations, and lots of software integrations. This was overkill for my needs (and the needs of a lot of people I know as well).
• Marketing/alert SMS platforms. There are texting platforms out there, but they’re all made for marketing, or mass communication, or two-way messaging. They could do email-to-text, but again, it’s overkill.
• Building your own. Obviously I did build my own, but there was more to it than connecting to the Twilio API and rolling. There’s all sorts of compliance work involved in sending text now (A2P 10DLC registration, carrier approval processes, and ongoing compliance requirements). Plus, as we all know, there’s an irony in building a system that might break to monitor other systems that might break. Ultimately it’s not going to save much (if any) money and will be an unnecessary hassle.

So that’s where text.email fits into the landscape.

It’s a drop-in replacement for what the carriers used to offer — same mental model, same simplicity, no new systems to maintain.

Email is the most battle-tested protocol you’re already running; we just convert it to SMS on the other end. You don’t have to worry about:

• API credentials expiring
• Another service going down and breaking your alerting chain
• The world of compliance (10DLC registration, carrier approvals, STOP and HELP handling)

Getting Started with text.email

text.email is a separate service from GMass, and one I hope you find has the same philosophy as GMass: You set it up, it integrates perfectly with your existing tools, and you’re set.

You can try out text.email by sending an email to yournumber@text.email.  You’ll get a text a few moments later.

Want to use it for your alerts? Sign up takes less than a minute. Pricing is $9.95 a month, which includes 200 messages, with overage at 5¢ per text.

Carrier email-to-SMS gateways are dead and they’re not coming back. If you’ve been limping along without SMS alerts or dealing with some brittle workaround, text.email is the fix.

It’s the same simplicity you had before, minus the carriers and minus any work required on your end.