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Just send the message from the free website that most companies provide to send SMS from the internet. I do that to my friends all the time at work because I'm online anyway. Suppose that doesn't work if you have to do it on the road, but get a Treo like I have and bookmark the SMS pages, and you've got free outbound TXT messages. I have free incoming text and voice with my plan, so it's completely free for me, though I generally use less than 100 mins of talk time and less than 100 messages a month, so no big deal. Verizon: https://www.vtext.com/customer_site/jsp/messaging_ lo.jsp US Cellular: http://usc.ztango.com/uscwmss Cingular: No page, but email goes through to number@mobile.mycingular.com I found this nifty page ( http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?m ode=details ) with a whole lot of others as well.

Here's a nice verizon trick, once you know someones' "nick" you can send em a message here:

https://www.vtext.com/customer_site/jsp/my_webpage .jsp?userName=null

and once you send that text message, their number comes up

2/28/2006 3:18 pm 617-835-3284 Message accepted by network NONE

Holy crap. You're right! Verizon does charge to receive text messages. That stinks. Seems a bit unfair that you can be billed for something that you have no control over. At least with an incoming call you can choose not to answer if you don't want to spend your minutes talking to the caller.

https://www.vtext.com/customer_site/jsp/aboutservi ce.jsp#Prices

With this simple website you could send out countless text messages to the same phone. BEst of all its free to send, not to recieve.

If we all did it (no, we should not all do this) it would , if I understand the article correctly, crash the system that phone is on.

But I am sure the Slashdot crowd could get more than 165 per second out

6093389293@vtext.com

... Verizon, which by far provides the best service in the US, has this feature:

vtext.com

FWIW, you can set up an alias for your Verizon phone and give people that instead of your phone number.

Go to Verizon Wireless TXT Messaging Page. If you're not a registered user, click on "Join Up!". It will prompt you for your number, then send a temporary password to your handset. Enter that password onto the page, then create your new password

Once you're registered, return to the vtext page, fill in the "Sign in" information and click the "Go" button. Then click on the "TXT Personalization". The resulting page tells you how to set up a "Nickname".

You can also click on help on the vtext page and select TXT Personalization for VZW's discussion of the steps above.

Hope I'm not too off-topic and this proves useful to folks.

You're honestly asking how a mobile phone user could pay to send an SMS message (data) when they already pay to make calls (more data).

No, I'm saying if you make the sender pay, then you're taking away a key feature of the service.

You bill them per message - it's what we all do in Europe and it makes SMS spam prohibitively expensive (not to mention the fact it's also illegal and carries huge penalties now).

Europe's SMS is significantly less useful than the US.

That obviously wouldn't work with this. Of course, your first 300 incoming messages with verizon are free. And I'm sure verizon would be willing to drop the charges if you told them you were sent these messages without your permission.