You need a Text Marketer account to use our email-to-text gateway. You can sign-up for free at www.textmarketer.co.uk and get 10 free credits to get you started.
Username and Password
To be sure that no-one else can use your account for sending text messages, we provide you with an API username and password to identify you when you use any of our API services, such as the email gateway. These are different to the username and password you use to log in to the web interface.
If you don't know your API username and password, you'll find them when you log on to the Text Marketer web interface here:
https://messagebox.textmarketer.co.uk/ (Account Settings > API Settings)
Email Subject: Field and Authentication - There are two ways we allow emails to be authenticated
Username and password
Your API username and password must go in the email subject, separated by the '%' sign. If you get the username or password wrong, or you forget the %, no text message will be sent and you will not get a response from the email gateway.
Domain Authentication
In this instance the subject field is ignored and the domain name from the email is used, this has to
be a company based domain (not hotmail etc) and your mail server needs to configured correctly
as we will reverse look up the domain to prevent unauthorised use.
INFO
To enable domain authentication, log in to your account then navigate to: Settings > Account Settings. Complete the “Use Domain Settings” box with your domain, click submit then click “toggle” next to your domain.
Email To: Field
For basic use of the email gateway, the To: field is used to specify the mobile number to send the message to. The address is:
where '<mobile-number>' is replaced with the mobile number of the recipient. For example to send to the mobile number 07777123123, the address to put in the To: field is either:
or, the international format for a UK number.
Numbers in international format should not include any leading zeros or + signs.
Please note that you cannot put multiple numbers in the To: field, only one number per email. If you want to send a message to multiple recipients, please see Advanced Use.
Please note that the email address you use for basic use should end in textmarketer.biz (as above) and NOT textmarketer.co.uk.
Email Body
The content of your email is the message you wish to send to the recipient. Your message can be on more than one line, by default it must end with two #.
INFO
You can change the termination string ## to anything you like up to 2 characters or you can disable it completely.
To change the settings, log in to your account then navigate to: Account Settings. Complete the “Message Termination” box with your changes then click on the save button.
There are some restrictions on the characters you can use in the email, please see Advanced Use.
Everything in your email up to the ## will be sent to the recipient, so be careful how much you write. Remember that a normal text message is only 160 characters.
How much is 160 characters?
The multi-line example is exactly 160 characters
So everything up to the ## is sent in the message, and the rest is discarded. This means that if your email software automatically includes a signature at the end of your email, it will not be sent to the recipient.
Long messages
What happens when your message exceeds 160 characters?
If you exceed 160 characters you automatically invoke 'concatenation sending'. This will mean that each message consists of 153-character ‘chunks’, i.e. no longer 160 characters. The extra characters are used to 'glue' the messages together. So a message that is 307 characters long will actually require 3 text messages to send (153 characters + 153 characters + 1 character). Although it will appear as one long text message to the recipient, it will use 3 credits to send.
The originator/sender
The originator of the message is what is displayed to the recipient as 'the sender'. This can be text (up to 11 characters) or a mobile number (up to 16 digits), . For example, you might want the originator to be “Hair Salon”. Or you might want it set to Joe's mobile number, so that people who reply to the message will send it directly to Joe's mobile.
INFO
For more advanced 2-way messaging, see Two-way messaging with txtUs© and reply keywords
The originator is set by including a line in the email body that ends with a '#', e.g.: Hair Salon#
You'll notice that the originator ends with one '#', whereas the message ends with a double '##'. It doesn't matter whether the message comes first, or the originator comes first, so long as the ending is correct. As shown in the examples 1 and 2.
Will both work, and will mean the recipient see's the sender as "Hair Salon".
If you do not set an originator in the email body, the default originator on your acount will be used.