In some cases I need to send a warning message or a notice to my cell phone when certain tasks are done or caught some unexpected errors by server cronjob. This is a quite exciting feature, I don’t need to sit in front of my computer to do the boring monitoring job.

With some googling, there is something called Email to SMS Gateway (here is the gateway list) that allow you to send an Email to phone company, and phone company automatically delivery the Email content as text message to the cell phone owner. In my case, for example, I need to send SMS to cell phone number 416-999-9999 and phone carrier is Rogers. Regarding to the gateway list, means I should send Email to 4169999999@pcs.rogers.com

My first thought about sending out Email is using simple PHP mail() function. Unluckily, the Email sent out couldn’t pass phone carrier’s spam filter (Not exactly know what happened, my guess is my domain can’t pass Reverse DNS checking).

With some googling again for sloving send out Email issue, I found out GMail accounts can actually be used as an SMTP server. If this is working, that means phone carrier directly receive email from GMail (email from GMail won’t be spam, right?).

Here’s a code snippet on how to do it. In the code, I used PHPMailer class.

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require("class.phpmailer.php");
 
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP(); // send via SMTP
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // turn on SMTP authentication
 
$mail->Username = "YOUR_GMAIL_ACCOUNT@gmail.com"; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = "YOUR_GMAIL_LOGIN_PASSWORD"; // SMTP password
 
$from_email = "example@example.com"; //Reply to this email ID
$to_email="4169999999@pcs.rogers.com"; // Recipients email ID
$to_name="to_this_name"; // Recipient's name
 
$mail->From = $from_email;
$mail->FromName = "from_this_name";
$mail->AddAddress($to_email,$to_name=);
$mail->AddReplyTo($from_email,"Webmaster");
$mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap
 
$mail->Subject = "TEXT_MESSAGE_SUBJECT";
$mail->Body = "TEXT_MESSAGE_CONTENT"; //HTML Body
$mail->AltBody = "TEXT_MESSAGE_CONTENT"; //Text Body
 
$mail->Send();

Have fun!