Send A Text Message (SMS, MMS) With Power Automate For Free

Power Automate can send a free text message to a mobile phone by using something called an email to text gateway. Every mobile phone company has one. You can send an email to a 10 digit phone number and the gateway domain in Outlook (e.g. [email protected]) and received it moments later as a text message. Of course, you need to know the receiver’s phone company to do this. So this technique is best used for internal company use-cases where you can ask people for their mobile phone company’s name or get a list of company supplied phones.

Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Safety Incident Notification
• Determine The Email To Text Gateway Domain
• Send A Text Message To A Single Phone Number
• Create A List Of Mobile Phone Companies And Their Email To Text Domains
• Setup A List Of Text Message Notification Subscribers
• Send A Text Message To Multiple Numbers On A Distribution List

Introduction: The Safety Incident Notification

Management at a construction need to be alerted when a safety incident occurs. Using Power Automate a text message (SMS/MMS) is sent to each manager so they can respond to the incident in a timely manner.

Determine The Email To Text Gateway Domain

Mobile phone companies provide an email to text gateway – which allow us to send an email to a phone number on their network and receive it as a text message (SMS/MMS). To send a text message through email we would send it to an email address combining a 10 digit phone number and the gateway domain. For example: [email protected].

The problem is every mobile phone company has a different email to text gateway domain. And some providers use separate domains for SMS & MMS. The easiest way to figure out our own domain is to do the reverse and send a text to an email address from our mobile phone.

Open your phone’s text messaging app and send a message to your email address.

The email received includes the 10 digit phone number at the gateway domain as the sender. In this example the phone number is assigned to AT&T Mobility which uses the domain txt.att.com.

Send A Text Message To A Single Phone Number

Now we have the information needed to send a text message using Power Automate. Open Power Automate and create a new flow with an instant trigger. Then add the Outlook – Send An Email (V2) action.

Use the 10 digit phone number at the gateway domain as the sender and make sure the Subject is null. If a subject line is provided the gateway might not accept it. Then include the following message in the body.

Give the flow a test run to see it in action.

And sure enough a text message is received by the mobile phone we used earlier.

Create A List Of Mobile Phone Companies And Their Email To Text Domains

To send text notifications to other members of the company we need to know their mobile phone company. From there we can infer the email to text domain using publicly available information. Here is a short list of SMS & MMS domains for some popular mobile phone companies in the United States.

To see a larger list of United States and International mobile phone companies check out this free resource I found on Github.

Take the short list above and use it to create a SharePoint list named Email To Text Providers. We will use it as part of a Power Automate flow to text message many people at once.

Setup A List Of Text Message Notification Subscribers

Now that we have a list of mobile phone companies we will create a second SharePoint list of people who need to be notified called Text Message Notification Subscribers. Populate the list with the data below. Subscriber Name and Phone Number have the data type single-line text. Provider and Provider: MMS are a lookup columns.

To configure the Provider and Provider: MMS lookup column use the settings shown below.

The fully-setup SharePoint list looks like this:

Send A Text Message To Multiple Numbers On A Distribution List

Finally, we will go back to Power Automate and create the flow to send a message to everyone on the Text Message Notification Subscribers list. Insert a SharePoint – Get Items action to obtain the subscribers list. Then add an Apply To Each action to send an email to each subscriber. Join the subscriber Phone Numbers with their Provider: MMS to form the email’s Send To address.

Add the following actions to the flow as shown below.

Then run the flow and watch as it sends a text message to everyone on the list.

Questions?

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