This question comes up periodically: how to use
EMAILX to send a text message. The answer is that virtually phone carriers offer a special email address format that allows you to email to a phone number on their service. The main problem is that you have to find out which carrier the recipient's phone is serviced by. There are probably services that allow you to look that up based on the phone # alone, but last I checked they were pay services. (There are also service providers that offer a universal gateway from email to text, also at a fee.) If you need to send to a vast and changing population of phones (like, say, a doctors office to confirm appointments), then you're probably better off with one of the all-in-one services. But if you have a limited set of recipients and it's practical to find out their carrier, then you can just email them with EMAILX. (As an example, you may want to set up automatic alert text messages that are sent to key support individuals when certain events occur.)
Here's a 2022 list of the carriers and their corresponding email-to-text addressing schemes:
SMS gateway.
Note that SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; after that you need (or may be auto-switched to) MMS. But even then, one problem to watch out for when emailing out through corporate SMTP services is that they are sometimes set up to automatically append some standard stuff to the end of every email (like privacy/legal notices, disclaimers, logos, etc.) most of which will muck up the simple result you're looking for.
