Church Related Information Technology Blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could send a text message to a group of people by simply sending an email?
You can! First you need the people’s cell phone numbers and the carrier they use. I obtained this by simply sending an email to our staff and requesting it.
Just open up your Exchange Management Console, go to “Recipient Configuration” and then “Mail Contact” section. Either right click the “Mail Contact” area and select “New Mail Contact” or select it at the right side of the console. Then for each person you want to add type their name as you like it to appear in the GAL and in the SMTP area add the phone number plus the carrier text code. Those can be found here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways. After creating the Mail Contact, I went to properties and added (SMS) to the end of the name in the General tab.
Once you have created your SMS Mail Contacts, you can then go to Distribution Group, right click and select “New Distribution Group” and give it a name that is easy to identify and remember. Then right click your newly created Distribution Group, select Properties, go to the “Members” tab and add the new contacts you created previously.
That’s it! You should now be able to send a text message to everyone you included in the Distribution Group.
Remember to remove your email signature and any other characters you do not want to include in your text message. Text messages are limited to 160 characters.
Also you may want to send the email as a BCC to prevent others from seeing the text numbers of the group.