LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Doing E-Mail on Your Cell Phone

Don't have a BlackBerry or Treo, but just a regular cell phone? Want to do mobile e-mail on the cheap? Try this and see if it works with your particular phone and cell provider:

Send an e-mail from your e-mail program to your SMS text messaging-enabled phone:

1) Go to "How To Address A Message To Other Wireless Devices", and bookmark it.
2) Scroll halfway down to the listing of wireless carriers. Note the e-mail address format for the desired carrier.
3) Go into your e-mail program, and address and send a message to your cell phone. (E.g., 8005555555@vtext.com for Verizon Wireless, substituting your 10-digit phone number.)

Once you receive it, reply to it on your phone.

So, what just happened? E-mail services talked to SMS text messaging services, and vice versa. In essence, your message went through an SMS-to-e-mail gateway. So folks can e-mail your cell phone using their regular e-mail program, and you can reply back. This is great if they don't have text messaging enabled on their phone, don't have a cell phone, don't know how to text message, or don't know the URL for your carrier's web-based "Send text message" feature.

The catch? Yes, there are several that come to mind:

• SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, including the To: and Subject: fields. Longer e-mail messages get truncated.


• The sender needs to know which wireless carrier you're using for the domain name portion of your phone's e-mail address (see the list linked above).


• Attachments may get stripped.


• Number portability: If you change carriers but keep your prior number, your e-mail domain name probably changed, so you'll need to alert others to update their e-mail address book. While your cell phone number stays the same, its e-mail address changes.

On some phones, you can save e-mail addresses. So you can be the originator and send them e-mail directly from your phone. By the way, if your phone has some type of predictive text entry option, such as T9 or iTap, try using it. It saves a ton of time because you only have to press each phone key once per letter. There are a few tricks to using predictive text entry, and so it's worth perusing your phone's manual.