How to Email a Phone Number

This article shows how to send an email to someone's phone without knowing their email address.

How Do I Send an Email to a Phone Number?

To send an email to a phone number, you’ll need to know a person’s full phone number and which mobile service provider they use. Here's how it all works.

1. Look up the Short Message Service (SMS) gateway address, which is the address after the @ sign in an email. For example, T-Mobile’s is tmomail.net. You can find this on your provider’s website, or look up the carrier's gateway in this online directory.

   Tip

   Some providers have an SMS gateway for text, and an Multimedia Message Service (MMS) gateway, for images and files. Check the provider’s website before sending.

2. Write out the email address as the complete phone number with no dashes and the gateway. For example: 1-123-867-5309 becomes 11238675309@tmomail.net.

3. Write the message or attach the picture and click send. Any replies will be sent to your email address as separate responses. The text message will appear on the recipient's phone as coming from your email address, and any responses will appear as your phone number's email address.

Can You Email to a Cellphone?

While you can send an email to any cellphone that can accept text messages, there are a few points of etiquette to consider before you click send.

• Be sure the person you’re contacting knows who you are, especially if it’s not obvious from your email address or phone number. It’s also wise to double-check the phone number before you click send.
• If the person you’re contacting has limited messages on their plan, use email-to-text sparingly. This is also true when a phone is “roaming,” or connected to a network other than one the owner has a contract with.
• Keep messages short. Longer messages may be broken up into multiple texts and will also take longer to be processed. In our tests, some of them didn’t even go through.
• Stick to plain text and avoid formatting like bold and italics or using emoji. Depending on the provider and email server, that formatting may be stripped out or rendered incorrectly making your text hard to read.
• If you’re including a phone on a group email, or vice versa, remember to remove it when done so unrelated messages don’t pile up in a text app or an inbox.