This article is just to show you THREE simple steps to send free SMS to mobile numbers using your Gmail account. If this is your first time of hearing about this or maybe you have heard about it somewhere before, but you are not currently exploring the new free Gmail SMS, that means you have been missing a lot. I have elaborated on what this new Gmail free SMS is all about in my previous article – Google Launches Free SMS Text Message from Gmail to Phone lines.
Without wasting much of your time, let me go straight to the three steps of sending free text message from your Gmail account.
Step 1:
Log into your Gmail account. Enter your contact’s name or phone number in the ‘Search or invite friends’ box in Chat, and select Send SMS from the box of options that appears to the right of your contact’s name. Or, if you already have a Chat window open for this contact, just click Options, and select Send SMS.
Step 2:
In the dialog box, enter a phone number in the ‘Send SMS messages to this number’ field. This feature is only launched in selected countries. Click here for the list of supported countries and operators. If you are not located in one of these countries you can still use it, but you won’t see the SMS option in Chat until you enable it manually in the Chat settings page.
Step 3:
A Chat window appears. Just type your message as you would normally. When you hit Enter, the message will be sent to the phone number you entered.
Text message received on my Blackberry after sending it from my Gmail account
When sending text message, it is absolutely free, however, when replying to text message from your phone, your network operator will charge you according the current SMS charge. Gmail will never charge for sending or receiving sms
If your contact replies, the text message response will appear as a reply in Chat. These conversations are stored in your Chat history just like regular chats (but keep in mind that you can’t go off the record while communicating via SMS).
Replying to SMS messages
Just like replying to your normal text message, so replying to text message sent from Gmail contact, you will need to add the incoming number to your phone’s address book (this number is associated with the sender’s Gmail account, so you can use it to send Chat messages to that person in the future – mine is 20202018). Then, you can reply to the message as you would any other text message, and your reply appears as a Chat message in your friend’s Gmail account.
Block and Unblock SMS from Gmail
The BLOCK SMS feature provided by Gmail is very useful. You can use it to block an unwanted SMS message from Gmail Chat, you can block future messages from the sender. Just reply to the message with the word ‘BLOCK’. Just as it is pretty easy blocking an unwanted SMS chat, unblocking any user that you have blocked is also easy. To do that, you can send a message with the phrase ‘UNBLOCK’ to the phone number from which the message was sent (the SMS messages sent from Gmail Chat have their own number associated with the sender’s email account).
Start or Stop Receiving SMS from Google Chat
If you no longer wish to receive SMS messages from any Gmail user, you can text ‘STOP’ to the system number of your carrier. When you text ‘STOP’ you will receive a message confirmation and you will no longer receive SMS messages from any Gmail user. To reactivate the service text ‘START’ to the system number.
For complete list all the system number of your carrier, please click here.
