Free SMS and so on (1)
When I bought my first mobile phone, I got the phone for free but I had to have the contract with the operator. I paid the bill every month therefore I had free time to call and also could send free SMS. However at that time I didn’t need to send the free text message at all until I met my wife. Everyday I needed to send numbers of messages, especially they were the international SMS. So I kept looking for some softwares or websites that could send free text messages. Nowadays I have collected lots of information. I think they will be worth sharing with others.
First www.txtbe.com is a nice choice. You just need to register with an email address. At the beginning you could send 5 free SMS everyday but now the amount is decreased to 2 free SMS everyday. But if you register many accounts via different emails you can get enough free text messages. Also free text messages can be accumulated, for example, if you haven’t sent messages for 4 days, you have 8 free SMS today. Of course the accumulation has the limitation (maximum 15 free text message). The length of the text message is 160 ASCII characters or 70 Unicode characters, in fact the last 2 characters won’t display correctly, so you’d better control the length of each free SMS under 156 ASCII or 68 Unicode.
Every time you send a text message to new receiver, you need additional information, such as IP, the account of the sender, and so on. The receiver can reply “BLOCK” to stop the SMS from this receiver. As a sender, you have to input the confirm code every time to prevent spam message.
The receiver can reply this message directly and the sender can receive it from his registered email. But the function can not work very well depending on where the receiver is living.
There are other disadvantages. 1) It cannot support all countries, for example Netherlands. 2) There can be failure to send SMS, repeating the same SMS several times or sending the SMS to stranger’s mobile phone. But I believe this kind of system bugs will be less and less.
www.txtbe.com has the limit of countries. For example, you cannot send a free text message to Netherlands. But there is another way to send free text messages that is through the famous www.twitter.com. The basic function of Twitter is to exchange the information among numbers of people. But there are various ways to extend its functions. For example, you can send the free SMS via the Direct Message. But the receiver has to register, verify his mobile number and add the sender to be his friend. Of course Twitter can be easily registered by Email, mobile phone and others softwares of instant messaging. Now lets see how we can send the free text message.
Obviously we need an account of Twitter. If we want to send a message to MyFrined1, there are in fact several different ways to achieve this. First the easiest way, 1) Go to the Twitter page 2) select “Send MyFriend1 a message” 3) write the content of the message. Second you can send “D MyFriends1 Content” from your mobile phone to +447624801423. Third , log into the softwares of instant messaging, then send the message to twitter@twitter.com. Pay attention to that the length of the message has to be controlled under 140 ASCII characters or 60 Unicode characters. Now it can also support the Chinese character.
Though the users of T-mobile or Lycamobile can send the international message as cheap as the local one, the Chinese mobile phones almost cannot receive it. So if you choose the Twitter, your friend can receive your free text messages wherever he has been living. Another thing should be mentioned, Twitter has the version of WAP. Considering the 3G is becoming more and more popular, this feature is quite useful.
Translated from 发免费短信及其它(1) and 发免费短信及其它(2)
[...] days ago, when I wanted to use txtbe to send free SMS I found that txtbe discontinued to provide free SMS to some countries such as UK [...]
[...] that providing free SMS service have several modes: websites such as txtbe make money by the click of advertising from visitors. But txtbe was not reachable in past few days, [...]