I've come across a number of websites purporting to empower you to send free text messages to mobile phones.
What is their business model? For example, do they spam the recipients with adverts?
Has anyone here used them? What did you think - good, bad or ugly?
Thanks, AJ
Not familiar with this concept, but anytime you see the word "free" for an internet app, you can just substitute "tons of ads coming your way".
I work in IT. It is possible to send text messages to cell phones via email.Corporate IT does this for internal communications all the time.
https://www.wikihow.com/Send-a-Text-from-Email
My first impression of the websites you reference is that they are some sort of scam.
Verizon used to have a spot on their website where Verizon cell phone users could send a text. IIRC, you had to pre-register and provide an email address as the sender. I don't think it is available anymore.
A friend of mine has WhatsApp on her (Windows 11) PC and also on her Android phone, both of them access the same account.
I've tried out two services. The first, long ago, limited the SMS size and appended a few words of ad (powered by xxx or similar) - the free service became unavailable at some time, maybe a year after I tried it. You were limited to one free msg per day, or could subscribe to get more, but it could be driven by cURL.. The other was much more recent, only about a couple of years ago, again limited free service and paid options for more; only tried one msg as it was not suitable for what I wanted (it was a web form with adsand bits to make it unsuitable for automation, if you didn't want to pay the subscription). I wanted something I could embed in a script to SMS me if my home network suffered a problem - but, mostly the problems I have are caused by VirginMedia borking the connection to the outside world, which would prevent the SMS getting out anyway.
Thank you.
I'm following DS's suggestion and will hopefully have time to give it a try later today. The internet reports the intended recipient's phone as being with Orange, but the recipient insists they're with EE. I'm hoping for Orange because feedback reports EE's gateway as unreliable.
ETA got a bounce from Orange so EE must have finally integrated their customers. The EE e-mail-to-text didn't bounce but I haven't heard from the recipient.
AJ
For a hairy tale, back in 1996 I knew a guy who ran bots in his high school IT class (it was a well decked out top school, he wrote a game as a class project) to vote for a fringe radio station song context by SMS. Eventually he burned by dropping several hundred votes in a minute for a song that didn't perform that evening, and they hired him.
Hired. Back then, hacking someone was still a way of job application.
And allegedly, one of his first major tasks at that job was "to find a way to clone the studio software hardware key." He said he cracked the software instead... not perfectly, but enough for them to run four or five machines by passing said single key around at certain moments.
It was nineties ex-Soviet Latvia. Software piracy was 90%+ even in official state institutions. By 1996 it was better, but if you called police two years earlier a likely answer could be that they don't have gas for their vehicles to react on your call, so come to the station yourself when you can and fill a protocol... good luck on any motion on it, staff hadn't receiving wages for three months or so. Of course, one could pay through... The land was effectively lawless, but mostly safe anyhow.
There used to be a way to do this on IFTTT but I don't know if it is still supported. You might want to check it out.