How to email a text message to a cell phone.

My next virtual ninja-assassin girlfriend.
My kids all make extensive use of the text service on their cell phones, so much so that we pay the $10 a month per phone for unlimited use. Sending a text also seems to be a more reliable method of contacting them. No one ever seems to answer their cell phone, but somehow text messages manage to get through. A while back I figured out how to send a text message to a cell phone using email. To do this you need two pieces of information: the phone number and the domain name of their carrier. It used to be that simply having the phone number would be enough to identify the carrier, but then portability came along, so that is no longer a sure fire method. There are services available that will identify the current carrier right now, but all the ones I have found so far seem to be geared to high volume customers, i.e. $12 a month and six cents per inquiry. I just want one, and no I'm not going to pay anything for this piece of information. I mean I could just ask my daughter who she signed up with, but that would be cheating if I'm writing a how-to article.

Search Bug will look up a phone number for you and tell you who the carrier is with this caveat: 

The phone type and carrier identified above are only correct if the number was never transfered, sold, ported or changed. Shown information represents original phone number assignment. Therefore, the above report may not be accurate as of today.

I looked up a number and got back this piece of information: 

Carrier* (not verified):

T MOBILE (OCN: 6529)

T MOBILE, I know who that is, but what's this OCN stuff? Wikipedia answers that one:

OCN - Operating company number, in telephony, a code assigned by the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) to telecommunications carriers (including landline, wireless carriers, and resellers of various types). Also known as a «NECA Company Code».

Well, I'm sure that's very interesting, but it's useless as far as what we are trying to do. Let's move on. Now we know the carrier we need the domain name. On email text messages I found this

T-Mobile

• 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net

So now I create a new contact, call it Kathryn Text. I combine her phone number with the T-mobile suffix tmomail.net and store it as her email address. Creating a new contact is the only way I found that I could reliably send text messages to a list of cell phone users. If I just add this address as another email address to an existing contact, there doesn't seem to be anyway to tell Gmail which address to use.

     If you have read this far you might be wondering why I needed to look up my daughter's carrier if I'm paying her text messaging bill. Well, she's gotten independent and bought herself a smart phone. I'll pay the fee for texting, but I'm not going to pay the $50 or whatever it is that Verizon charges for a smart phone data pack. She wasn't impressed by Verizon's prices either, so she shopped around and picked T-Mobile.

Update: Got a confirmation by return text, but the domain was now brightspotmobile.net and the phone number had a 1 in front of it.