Email to text for business: how it works and when to use it

Email to text sends an ordinary email to a special address, such as a 10-digit number at a carrier's gateway domain, and the carrier converts it into an SMS on the recipient's phone. It works for a note to your own phone, but it is a poor channel for business texting. Gateways need you to know each recipient's carrier, give you no delivery receipts, handle replies badly and sit outside 10DLC registration, so carriers can filter or drop the traffic without telling you.

This post explains what happens between your outbox and the recipient's phone, where the method breaks, the cases where it's still fine, and what to use instead: a registered business number you text from an inbox or call through an API. We make Ready, which is one way to do that last part. We'll also say where Ready doesn't fit.

How email to text works

Carrier gateway addresses

US carriers have long run email-to-SMS gateways. You address an email to the recipient's 10-digit number at their carrier's gateway domain:

• Verizon: 5551234567@vtext.com (SMS), @vzwpix.com (MMS)
• AT&T: 5551234567@txt.att.net (SMS), @mms.att.net (MMS). AT&T retired its email-to-text gateway in 2025, so don't build anything on it.
• T-Mobile: 5551234567@tmomail.net

Smaller carriers and prepaid brands each have their own domains, and some don't run a gateway at all.

What happens to the message on the way

The gateway receives your email, strips most of the formatting, and rebuilds it as a text. Depending on the carrier, it may:

• Put the sender's email address or a carrier short code in front of the message
• Cut the text off near 160 characters, or turn a long email into an MMS
• Merge the subject line into the body
• Drop attachments, HTML and signatures, or turn them into junk characters

The recipient sees a text that doesn't come from a normal business phone number. If they reply, the reply goes back through the gateway as an email, if it arrives at all.

Why email to text gateways break for business

For one person texting themselves, none of this matters. For a business texting customers, each of these is a real problem:

1. You have to know the carrier. The address depends on the recipient's carrier, and people switch carriers and keep their number. Send to the wrong domain and the message disappears, with no bounce in many cases.
2. No delivery receipts. You can't tell delivered from filtered from dropped. Carrier gateways provide no status data you could act on.
3. It isn't registered traffic. US carriers expect business texting (application-to-person, or A2P) to come from registered brands and campaigns under A2P 10DLC. Gateways were built for person-to-person use, and carriers rate-limit and filter bulk or commercial traffic on them.
4. No opt-out handling. Nobody processes a STOP reply. You have to track opt-outs by hand across every list, which is how businesses end up texting people who already asked them to stop. With TCPA exposure of $500 to $1,500 per text, that is an expensive gap.
5. No quiet hours. An email sent from a cron job at 11 PM Eastern arrives at 11 PM Eastern.
6. Messy replies. Replies come back as emails from carrier domains, they aren't threaded with the original, and they're easy to lose.
7. A strange sender. The sender looks like an email relay, not your business. That hurts trust before the recipient reads a word.

The three routes people mean by "email to text"

The phrase covers three different setups, and they deserve different verdicts:

An email-to-SMS service gives your account an email address, and anything you send to it goes out as a text from the provider's numbers. If the provider sends from registered numbers and handles opt-outs, that is a legitimate setup for teams whose workflow really does start in an inbox. Ready doesn't offer an email-in address. We send through an app inbox and an API. If you specifically need "send an email, a text goes out," pick a service built for that.

When email to text is fine

The honest answer is "more often than vendors admit," as long as the recipient is you:

• Alerts to your own phone or your on-call engineer's phone. A server monitor emailing you when disk space is low is a reasonable use. You know your carrier, and a missed message only costs you.
• A stopgap for a few days while you set up something better.
• Personal one-off messages, where the odd formatting doesn't matter.

Once the recipient is a customer, a patient, a donor or a lead, the problems above stop being quirks. They become delivery and compliance risks.

The better route: a registered business number

What replaces the gateway is a business phone number that sits on a registered 10DLC brand and campaign. Carriers can see who is sending and why, and the platform handles opt-outs, quiet hours and replies for you. If you're new to the registration side, 10DLC rules and requirements covers what carriers check.

With an inbox (no code)

If people on your team were sending emails to gateway addresses by hand, the replacement is a shared Inbox. You type the text, it goes out from your business number, and replies come back into the same thread. In Ready, that inbox includes:

• Registration done in the app: brand and campaign. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
• Automatic STOP handling. An opt-out applies across every campaign, so that contact can't be texted again.
• Quiet-hours enforcement based on the recipient's area.
• Bulk campaigns, templates and contact management for sends that go to a list.
• Native GoHighLevel sync if your team works in GHL.

With an API (replacing the SMTP call)

If software was sending your gateway emails, such as an alerting script, an order system or a booking tool, you can swap the SMTP call for one HTTP request. This is a single text through Ready's messaging API:

curl -X POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages \
  -H "X-API-Key: $READY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: 6f1c2a9e-3b7d-4c51-9a0e-2d8f4b7c1e55" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"to": "+12125550199", "body": "Your order #1042 has shipped.", "consent_attested": true}'

You don't need a carrier lookup. to is just the phone number in E.164 format. consent_attested is your statement that the recipient agreed to receive texts. The Idempotency-Key header means a retry after a network timeout won't send the same text twice. Email has no equivalent, which is why gateway alerts sometimes arrive two or three times.

Some behaviour you get without writing any code: opt-outs, numbers on your Ban list and known landlines are refused up front and not charged. A text sent during the recipient's quiet hours is held only if the window opens within 6 hours; otherwise it is refused with 409 QUIET_HOURS_BLOCK and you send it again. A held text is charged only when it sends. For sending one text to many numbers, use POST /v1/messages/bulk. Full reference: docs.tryready.com/api/messages. If you're planning a bigger build, see our SMS API integration walk-through and the overview of an A2P SMS API.

What it costs to move off the gateway

Gateways cost nothing per message, so it's fair to ask what you're paying for. Here is a worked example with stated assumptions.

Assumptions: a business sends 1,200 order and appointment texts a month. Each text is about 150 plain characters (GSM-7), which fits in one segment. About 300 recipients reply with a one-segment message. The business uses one number.

• Sent texts: 1,200 × $0.0075 = $9, plus 1,200 × $0.0045 carrier fee
• Replies: replies are billed like sent texts, so 300 × $0.0075 = $2, plus 300 × $0.0045
• Registration: no setup fee. The charge at submit is $25, which covers the first month. After that you pay $25/mo for registration and $2/mo per number.

The per-segment figures exclude the compliance surcharge. Scrubbing and landline validation each cost $0.003 extra per segment when switched on for an account, and both are off by default.

The segment trap to watch: add one emoji to that 150-character message and the per-segment limit drops to 70 characters (67 per part in a multipart message). The text becomes 3 segments instead of 1, which makes the sending cost 3x. Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so those don't change the count. Emoji do. Our 10DLC cost breakdown goes through every registration fee in detail.

Ready's Standard rate is one flat rate at every volume. Raw carrier APIs can cost less per segment. What you're paying for is registration, the inbox and the compliance handling being done for you. Rates are on our pricing page.

Getting from gateway emails to registered texts

1. List what you currently send through gateways, and who receives it. Anything sent only to your own staff can stay on email for now.
2. Confirm you have consent for every customer-facing recipient. SMS should go to people who opted in or who already replied to you. Cold outreach belongs on the phone and in the mail.
3. Sign up and add a card. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it. The first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends, so use them to test before you register. They end as soon as a registration is paid for.
4. Register your brand and campaign. You can send up to 500 texts a month before registering, at the normal per-text rate. After that, registration is required.
5. Swap the sending step: a person uses the inbox, or code calls POST /v1/messages. The quickstart walks through your first API send.

The practical takeaway

Email to text is fine for alerts to yourself and for a short stopgap. For customer-facing texting, carrier gateways give you no delivery data, no opt-out handling and no registration. Carriers are retiring or restricting them anyway. If your team's workflow really has to start in an email client, use an email-to-SMS service that sends from registered numbers. Otherwise, move to a registered business number with an inbox or an API. If you want to try Ready for that, sign up here and send your first 20 one-to-one texts free.

FAQ

Is email to text free?

Carrier gateways don't charge the sender per message. The costs are lost messages, no delivery data and no opt-out handling, which matters once you're texting customers.

How do I find someone's carrier for an email-to-SMS address?

You have to ask them or look it up. If they've switched carriers since, the address silently stops working. A registered number with an API removes that step, because you send to the phone number itself.

Can customers reply to an email-to-text message?

Sometimes. Replies come back as emails from a carrier domain, usually without threading, and some never arrive. A business number with an inbox keeps each reply in the same conversation.

Does Ready offer an email-to-SMS address?

No. Ready sends through its app inbox, bulk campaigns and the messaging API at api.tryready.com. If you need an email-in address that turns emails into texts, use a service built for that workflow.

Do I need 10DLC registration to stop using email to text?

For ongoing business texting from a regular 10-digit number, yes. On Ready, an account can send up to 500 texts a month before registering. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days, and the registration charge at submit is $25.