Tips for Tuesday: Sending emails as text messages

Crap. You’re out of data range, and you need to send an email. All you can do is write it out now, and send it the moment you regain signal, right? If you have no signal, period, that’s probably the case. But if it’s only data signal you’re lacking — that is, you can still make calls and send text messages — you might have an alternative. Did you know that you can send an email as a text message from your BlackBerry? I did not know this myself until I ran into this guest post on BlackBerry Cool. It’s a rather simple process — so simple that it’s amazing more people don’t use it. Seriously, all you do is type an email address into the To: field in any new SMS. Type your message, and voila! The recipient will receive your text message via email. It sends as an MMS technically, but the size is very small, since it’s just text. That means you can send when you don’t have 3G (or 4G) data access. The recipient might be confused, since they’ll see your phone number rather than an email address. But the messages is the same nonetheless. The recipient can respond to you as well, by replying normally. That will come back to your BlackBerry as an MMS. The conversation can continue that way until you decide between email and MMS communications. This tip probably doesn’t have widespread uses. Most of the time you specifically want to send either a text message or an email. But there is a way to do it both ways.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.