Google Voice Lets Your Forward AND Reply to SMS via Email!

by Ronen Halevy on Sep 9th, 2009 at 10:04 am EST

This little tidbit of news made my week! Google Voice now lets you forward and reply to SMS through email. That means if somebody text messages your Google Voice number then you can choose to have it forwarded to your email address. You can then reply to that email and it will respond with a text message.

This is just one step closer to being able to disable this price gouging $4.99/month text messaging plan I have on AT&T.

Just fire up your Google Voice account if you have one at www.google.com/voice and select the Settings tab and then the Voicemail & SMS tab.

via TechCrunch

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 and is filed under News.
Tags: Email, Google Voice, SMS

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12 Comments to “Google Voice Lets Your Forward AND Reply to SMS via Email!”

Posted by: Nikolaus Walch
September 9, 2009 at 10:40 am EST

So wait, if I reply to that e-mail, Google will take that e-mail and turn it into an SMS to the person who originally SMSed me? That is not spelled out in what is written in the article, so I hope that is how it works. I wouldn’t mind a copy/paste in the BB app so I can copy out SMS to fwd to someone else on BBM.

Reply
- Posted by: ShvartzBerry
  September 9, 2009 at 11:54 am EST
  
  Yeah. Really the SMS feature through Voice works that way too. The actual SMS comes to your phone from some random number but when you reply to it, it manages to find its way back to the original sender and into the thread on Voice.
  
  The BB app is missing a lot in the way of standard features. No AutoText support is killing me!
  
  Reply
Posted by: Corinnne
September 9, 2009 at 11:41 am EST

Make sure to test it because I just did.

When I only replied to the email it sent the text along with everything else in the email.
When I cleared the prior contents on had only my reply sent, it added the “Sent from a Blackberry” signature that I have.

So either way, you’re going to have either less than 160 characters per text to send or you’ll be replying with more than 1 email.

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Posted by: ShvartzBerry
September 9, 2009 at 11:52 am EST

I tested it out and it worked flawlessly. But then I was using a GMail account so Google has probably got the “filtering out the original message” down pat in GMail but maybe has problems with mail coming from a BB. I would definitely submit this to them as an issue.

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- Posted by: ShvartzBerry
  September 9, 2009 at 12:09 pm EST
  
  And I can’t even test it out because so far, GV will only let you forward it to the account you have GV signed up with and I don’t feel like adding that to my BB Inbox.
  
  Reply
  - Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    September 9, 2009 at 12:11 pm EST
    
    @shvartz…
    I ran into that same problem. Easy fix. Just associate the second email address with your google account and you will be able to set it up to forward. Takes a second
    
    Reply
    - Posted by: ShvartzBerry
      September 9, 2009 at 12:18 pm EST
      
      That works for Emailing of Voicemail Notifications. But does not seem to work for SMS forwarding.
      
      Reply
      - Posted by: AdamG
        September 9, 2009 at 2:04 pm EST
        
        In your Gmail/GV account, set up a Filter that does this…
        
        from:(@txt.voice.google.com) to:(Your@GV-GmailAddress.com)
        Do this: Forward to AnyOther@EmailAddress.com
        
        On the account I’m not forwarding, meaning, I have my GV/Gmail address setup on BIS, I’m able to reply to SMS from the GMail Inbox on desktop, but reply from BB Inbox is giving me a delivery notification failure.
Posted by: ShvartzBerry
September 9, 2009 at 12:12 pm EST

I was originally quite excited to see that the email came from something…@txt.voice.google.com I thought that might mean we can actually send to SMS via email direct which is a feature I am waiting for. There are some SMS services that aren’t TRUE SMS in that they try to send an email and that is currently not possible with GV. Anyway, I tried sending to @txt.voice.google.com and it did NOT work. Oh well.

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- Posted by: Stacy
  October 9, 2009 at 10:59 am EST
  
  If I understand what you’re saying correctly, it CAN do that! Any person who has texted my GV number and I’ve gotten the notification thru Gmail, I have saved that unique email addy that ends in @txt.voice.google,com and added it to my contacts, and now I can easily and quickly “text” them via email directly. But maybe that’s not what you meant exactly. *I* was stoked for this too tho, since I found the GV BB app to be lacking, and have just been previously going to my browser GV mobile page and texting from there.
  
  Reply
Posted by: Bingo
September 11, 2009 at 5:54 am EST

That’s great.. nice service they started now.

Reply