You can send free text messages to a cell phone. Note that the receiving party may incur a charge. All you need is an email account, that persons cell phone number, and the cell phone provider's SMS gateway. List of worldwide SMS gateway domains: http://www.connexin.net/internet-acronyms.html or: http://sms-gateway-service.com/?page_id=13 SMS and MMS gateway domains: http://basicstate.com/htm/page.htm If you do not know their cell phone provider, you can look it up by their phone number. (may not be very accurate) or try the White Pages SMS= Short Message Service MMS = Multimedia Message Service

Why do this?

• Emergency broadcasts at a school or place of business (you can do mass emailings)
• Contact employees on their cell phones if a voice call is not a convenient option
• Much easier using your computer to type an email than using your thumbs on a phone
• The person receiving the message can text you back
• Remind your kids to be home on time
• SMS is the most widely used data application on the planet
• Check out Wikipedia on text messaging- .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging
• Wikipedia business uses of text messaging

Notes:

• SMS is limited to 160 characters (including spaces)
• May be security issues- such as someone sending fraudulent messages (spoofing)
• What do those funny symbols mean?           AFAIK — "as far as I know"
    Look it up at: http://www.alsindependence.com/Internet_Slang.htm    or   http://www.acronymfinder.com/
• Short codes, short numbers- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code
• Google SMS- http://www.google.com/mobile
• What's next? MMS! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_System
• You can send longer MMS messages, and they can include photos and other MIME encoded files
• Verizon MMS = phonenumber@vzwpix.com
• Other MMS at: http://basicstate.com/htm/page.htm

Note: the following site at one time was free, but is now defunct (2015): http://csharpcomputing.com/webapps/lookup.jsp