In this article we will discuss how you can send your email from your email client, so we can send this out as an SMS for you. We will cover the following topics:
Please make sure you have already added your email and configured your settings in your dashboard before going through the steps below. If you did not do this yet, please follow the instructions here: Setting up Email to SMS
NOTE: Email to SMS usually has less than 10 messages per minute throughput rate. Anything above this rate may see delivery delays. Please use this rate to calculate your send times and deliveries to reach your recipients in time.
Creating your email
To send an Email to SMS, simply create a new email in your email client. You can set your email up as follows:
To Field
In the 'To' field, enter your recipient number as follows: <recipientnumber>@sms.messagebird.com
Subject Field
In step 3 of the Email to SMS setup, you had the option to select 'SMS in subject', as in the screenshot below.
- If you ticked the box: You have entered a default originator in your dashboard. You can enter the content of your SMS message in the subject line.
- If you did not tick the box: You can enter the originator of your SMS in the subject line.
Email Body Field
- If you entered the content of your SMS message in the subject line, you can leave your email body empty.
- If you entered your originator of your SMS in the subject line, you can enter the content of your SMS message in the email body.
Note that you cannot use 'MessageBird' as your originator; these messages will be blocked.
Your customers will receive the SMS on their phone as shown below:
Excluding your email signature
Using markers
If you have a signature on your email, or you only want to send part of the information in the email as an SMS, you can use markers to indicate the beginning and end of your SMS message.
The markers --begin and/or --end in your email message specify which parts of your message should be included in the SMS.
Below you can see an example of an email where we have used the markers to exclude the signature, and only included the content of the SMS: 'This is a test message'
SMS in Subject Line
Alternatively, you can also configure the domain settings so that your subject line contains the content of the SMS. You must add a default originator, as explained in step 3 here: Setting up Email to SMS. Below you can see an example of what such an email would look like in your email client:
Sending to groups
You can send Email to SMS to groups of contacts saved in MessageBird. Make sure that your group is an existing group saved in your MessageBird, and that the group name only contains standard characters and numbers, no spaces or special characters. You can read here how to create a group: Create a Group
To send an Email to SMS message to one of your groups, you can use the following recipient format:
- <groupname>@sms.messagebird.com