During one of the Contact Management Sessions last week at the Freeport-Galena Area Association of Realtors, a conversation came up regarding slick and efficient ways to keep in touch with your email while out on the road. Of course, with a trusty PDA/Phone (or most web enabled cell phones) you can log into your email system and dig right into your inbox. But what if you are waiting for a specific email, such as closing document fax or a confirmation on a showing appointment?
Well, you can take advantage of a not-so-readily publicized function of almost every US Cell Phone Provider - Your Cell Phone has its own email address! What does that mean? It means, that you can send an email directly to your cell phone by using the email domain of your provider (a short list of some of the major carriers is below). The format is 3125551212@carrier.domain, where 3125551212 is your cell phone number.
| AT&T Wireless | mmode.com | |
| Cingular | mobile.mycingular.com | |
| Nextel | messaging.nextel.com | |
| Orange | orange.net | |
| Sprint PCS | messaging.sprintpcs.com | |
| T-Mobile | tmomail.net | |
| US Cellular | mms.uscc.net | |
| Verizon | vtext.com | |
| Virgin Mobile | vmobl.com |
If your carrier is not listed, you can call them and ask what their cell phone email domain is. Once you know that, you can test it by launching your email client, and shooting yourself an email. Within a few seconds, your hip or purse should make a beep or vibrate from shear technological excitement!
So how does this help you keep in touch? Well, the second piece of this is using your email filtering (which most webmail services have). You can set up a filter to forward any email from a specific person, a keyword in a subject (’Showing Request’), or even contains a fax attachment to your cell phone. This will now give you an instantaneous notification that an email message that needs attending to has arrived.
No more checking your inbox every five minutes to see if you got that email, your cell phone will tell you the moment you get. How much more productive will that be! Tend to important emails immediately, and handle the rest when you have time to get in front of a computer and not a 3×3inch screen.
This is a great idea, Chris! I was familiar with having emails sent to your cell phone, but filtering locally important messages for remote notification is a new approach and can be quite useful.
Am extension of this functionality is Teleflip. You can send an e-mail to just about any cell phone even if you do not know the recipient’s carrier. From your e-mail client, send the message to 2135551212@teleflip.com where 2135551212 is the complete cell phone number. The e-mail then shows up as a text message on the cell phone. Remember, cell phone carriers may (will) charge for text messages. There are also size limits on text messages - typically 160 characters.
Teleflip’s web site (www.teleflip.com) says they are about to launch a new service, but at the bottom of the page, it says that their original service is still available to existing customers. When this service originally came out, they gave you something like 200 free messages sent out a month from a given e-mail address. After that, you had to sign up for a monthly plan. I just tried it from several e-mail addresses and clients and it still is working great.
This can be a great service for sending short e-mail messages out to a group of people who may be using different cell phone carriers or if you don’t know who the carrier is. I don’t have any thing to do with teleflip, except for being a satisfied user.
Please send the instructions if they are available for sending email to a cell phone.Just basic stuff.
Thanks so much for the information. It was extremely helpful. I am a traveling nurse so it comes in handy at times. Thanks again!
This is a very interesting feature… Would I be able to send my phone attachments like this…? Such as maby… ringtones or pictures?