Access Important Email on Cell Phone Without a Data Plan

Call me cheap but I think that $35 a month to access the Internet with your cell phone is outrageous. My wife and I have semi-smart phones without a data plan.

My wife recently changed the way she works. She frequently receives last minute rush jobs via email. She came to me yesterday and said that she thought she needed a data plan so that she could check her email when she was away from her computer so that she wouldn’t miss any good paying rush jobs. While it would be well worth the 35 bucks to not miss a good job I thought there must be a better (free) way. ‘Cause I’m cheap like that!

Here is my solution. My wife uses Gmail so I set up a simple filter to send important emails to her cell phone as text messages. First you need the email address of your cell phone. You probably didn’t even know your cell phone had an email address. Find your phones email address from the following chart. My wife has AT&T wireless so I went with a 4085551212@cingularme.com email address.

Now to get Gmail to send important emails to your cell phone click the Gear/Mail Settings/Filters/Create a new filter to get to the “Create a Filter” page. In the “From:” box enter the important email address. You can set up other criteria here to filter just the emails you really want. Click “Next Step” to finish making the filter. On this page you want to check “Forward it” but that box should be greyed-out. Click on the “Manage your forwarding addresses” link then click the “Add a forwarding address” button. Enter your phones email address. Gmail will send an email to your cell phone. You will need to enter the confirmation number into Gmail to verify that the email address really is yours. Once that is done the “Forward it” checkbox will no longer be greyed-out and you will have the option to forward to your cell phones email address. Click “Create Filter” and all your important emails will be sent to your cell phone as text messages.

Replying to your emails. Most phones will let you send text messages to email addresses but some dumb phones will not let you enter an “@” symbol. Here is a trick I found that works with AT&T to send text messages to email addresses with any phone. In the “TO” field enter “36245” and in the message body enter the recipients email address followed by a space then your message. Something like this:

TO: 36245

{body}
anemailaddress@somenetwork.com {space} Hello, Glad to hear from you!

Now my wife gets her very important emails sent straight to her cell phone. She doesn’t even have to check her email since her phone rings every time a new important message arrives. She can send a quick email from her phone saying that she can do the job and all is well without paying for a data plan.

Here are a bunch more cell phone email address I found for International and smaller US carriers: