Sunday, November 18, 2012

Forward your Android SMS to email

 
There are apps out there that forward your SMS to your email but in my experience they all either don't work, or cost money. Being the cheapskate that I am, definitely wasn't going to pay money for something like that, so I started brainstorming.

I needed something to be running on my Android phone that would grab my texts and email them to me. That way if I get an SMS and my phone is in the other room charging or something I could see it on my iPad, etc. Using Google Voice for this kind of stuff is not a perfect solution because they only forward SMS that was sent to your Google number, not to your actual cell phone number.

I played around with a couple of apps and never could get the email feature to work. But I did get the feature to forward the SMS to another phone number to work, however. So I setup the free Android app "SMS Forwarding" to forward to my email via my IFTTT phone number and problem solved! Here's how to do it:

1. Setup a free ifttt.com acccount

2. Setup my shared IFTTT recipe which you can find here: https://ifttt.com/recipes/66951. You'll have to confirm your phone number and email address with IFTTT and what not but it's pretty self-explanatory.

3. Install free Android app "SMS Forwarding" on your Android phone. I believe the version I am using is 1.4.3.
 

4. Setup the "SMS Forwarding" app to forward all your SMS messages to your IFTTT phone number. To do this, you will open the app, check "Enable Forwarding" and check "Forward with SMS". Then select "Destination Number" and enter your IFTTT phone number. You can find your IFTTT phone number by viewing your IFTTT recipe or your IFTTT SMS channel. Here's a screenshot of the app before configuration has taken place. (Don't copy these settings.)


5. Test it out. It should be good to go now!! Mine's working great! You can also setup "SMS Forwarding" to notify you of missed calls and low battery but I haven't tried those yet. Be sure to comment if you try them!

BTW, ifttt.com is awesome! There are a zillion different things you can do with this free service...






4 comments:

  1. What's the best way to do the reply routing? When I set it up with the app mentioned above, the reply goes back to my original number and not the recipient who sent me the SMS to begin with.


    TC

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I believe this app does not support this feature. Check out Google Voice and see if it meets your needs.

      Delete
  2. Looking for exactly this kind of service, but I wish to forward the SMS text message received on a dumb phone # to a smartphone # (in this case a Blackberry ver.7). Is there some way to do this without using an Android app?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Doesn't AT&T have an optional web console for you to manage your text forwarding and stuff? That's the only way I could think of to do this with a dumb phone.

    ReplyDelete

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