Email To SMS

I’ve been using Home Automation to send SMS messages to me for years.  Also for years I have been using a pay service called Twilio to send texts from my home automation software Home Assistant to my cell phone when an automation was triggered.  For example.  If you ring my doorbell, I get a text.   I’ve since discovered that I can send emails to SMS from Home Assistant to my phone for FREE.

Twilio began using a verification method called A2P 10DLC to make sure you aren’t a phone spammer or something.  For whatever reason I simply could not get my phone registered.  I’ve been trying for months and have engaged Twilio support a number of times and I’m right at the cutoff with no luck.

So I dumped Twilio today after I learned this neat trick

 sent in an email sends an SMS text to Verizon subscribers.  Check with your carrier for their specific addressing requirements.

SMTP

Not only is that pretty cool in and among itself,  I found out I could set up an automation in Home Assistant to do this automatically.   I’m a Mac user so the first thing I need to do is to create an app specific password.  Once you log in there you click the app specific password box and create a new login.  I named mine HA SMTP.

App Specific Password Creation

Home Assistant Automation

To create an automation you first need to add an SMTP notification to your configuration.yaml file.  Open that and add the following to the file.

notify:
    
  - name: email_notification
    platform: smtp
    server: smtp.mail.me.com
    port: 587
    timeout: 15
    sender: 
    recipient: 
      - ""
      - ""
    starttls: true
    username: 
    password: app specific password

Now for your automation simple choose notify.email_notification from the automation drop down Action list.

Automation

Now in this instance when the Garage Door goes up……….My wife and I get a text.

It’s all free.

Conclusion

There is more than one way to skin a cat and more than one way to send a notification.  I had no clue that you could send an SMS to a phone number via email.  Maybe I knew and forgot. Either way it’s better than paying Twilio per text for years.