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How to Send Text Messages With PHP

Kevin Jensen Last updated Jan 12, 2021

 10 likes |  15 min |  English

Text messaging has become extremely widespread throughout the world—to the point
where an increasing number of web applications have integrated SMS to notify users of
events, sales or coupons directly through their mobile devices. If you're looking to grow
your business, a PHP text message script can be crucial.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send a message to mobile using PHP code.

Premium Option
Before we get into the step-by-step process, you might want to look at a ready-made
solution: Smart SMS & Email Manager (SSEM), available on CodeCanyon. This script to
send SMS through PHP lets you:

manage your contacts

create SMS and email templates
send bulk SMS and email messages
schedule SMS and email
and much more

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If you want to learn how to send SMS through PHP code, here's how to do it.

Overview
Sending a text message (SMS) is actually pretty easy. Below is a simplified diagram of
how a message can be sent from a web application to a wireless device.

We'll break this down, one piece at a time:

The message is composed using a web application that's stored and executed on
an HTTP server and then sent through the internet ("the cloud") as an email
message.
The email is received by a Short Message Service Gateway (SMS Gateway), which
converts the message from an email message to an SMS message. 

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The SMS message is then handed to a Short Message Service Center (SMSC),
which is a server that routes data to specific mobile devices.
The message is finally transmitted over the wireless network to the recipient.

Most wireless networks have an SMS gateway through which email messages can be
sent as text messages to a mobile device. This is nice because, from a developer's
standpoint, it's generally free—however, it's of course not a free service for the end
user. Fees still apply to the recipient, and messages sent via email will be billed as a
non-network text message.

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Email to SMS
To learn how to send a message to mobile via email using PHP code, you'll generally
require only two things:

1. the phone number or unique identifier of the mobile device you want to reach
2. the wireless network's domain name (many can be found in this list of email to
SMS addresses)

The following convention can be followed for most carriers:

1 phoneNumber@domainName.com

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phoneNumber is the phone number of the mobile device to send the message to, and
domainName.com is the address for the network's SMS Gateway.

To send an SMS through PHP to Mr. Example, you could simply add
3855550168@vtext.com to any email client, type a message, and hit send. This will send
a text message to phone number +1 (385) 555-0168 on the Verizon Wireless Network.

For example, I'll send a text message to myself using Gmail.

When my phone receives the message, it should look like this:

Pretty awesome! It's fun to think of the possibilities available when sending SMS from a
PHP website to mobile.

PHP's mail Function

Let's take things a step further. Using the SMS Gateway, we can send an SMS to mobile
using PHP's mail function. The mail function has the following signature:


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1 bool mail ( string $to , string $subject , string $message [, string $additional_head

You can read more about it in the PHP documentation.

$to defines the receiver or receivers of the message. Valid examples include:
user@example.com
user1@example.com, user2@example.com
User <user@example.com>
User1 <user1@example.com>, User2 <user2@example.com>
$subject is rather self-explanatory; it should be a string containing the desired
subject. However, SMS messages do not require a subject.
$message is the message to be delivered. As mentioned in the PHP manual, "each
line should be separated with a LF (\n). Lines should not be larger than 70
characters."

To replicate the earlier functionality, we could write the following PHP code:

1 mail( '3855550168@vtext.com', '', 'Testing' );

A Test Drive
Let's run a test with PHP to make sure that everything is set up correctly and that the
mail function will, in fact, send a text message. Using the following code, we can run:

1 <?php
2
3 var_dump( mail( '##########@vtext.com', '', 'This was sent with PHP.' ) ); // bool(tr
4
5 ?>

When my phone receives the message, it looks like this:

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If you are getting an error, see the troubleshooting section.

As you can see in the PHP send SMS example above, the message shows that it's from
Gmail. This is because I route all my outgoing messages from my local server through
that service. Unfortunately, as of this writing, I have been unsuccessful at altering the
From header to reflect an alternate address. It seems that the email headers are
stripped and replaced with headers prepared by the SMS gateway. If anyone knows of a
workaround, please leave a comment and let the rest of us know!

Adding Usability

The Markup
With the basics out of the way, let's take this PHP text message script and wrap a user
interface around it. First, we'll set up a simple form to our send free SMS HTML code:

1 <!DOCTYPE html>
2 <head>
3 <meta charset="utf-8" />
4 </head>
5 <body>
6 <div id="container">
7 <h1>Sending SMS with PHP</h1>
8 <form action="" method="post">
9 <ul>
10 <li>
11 <label for="phoneNumber">Phone Number</label>
12 <input type="text" name="phoneNumber" id="phoneNumber" placeholder="385555016
13 <li>
14 <label for="carrier">Carrier</label> 
15 <input type="text" name="carrier" id="carrier" />
16 </li>

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17 <li>
18 <label for="smsMessage">Message</label>
19 <textarea name="smsMessage" id="smsMessage" cols="45" rows="15"></textarea>
20 </li>
21 <li><input type="submit" name="sendMessage" id="sendMessage" value="Send Messag
22 </ul>
23 </form>
24 </div>
25 </body>
26 </html>

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The Style
Next, we'll sprinkle in some CSS:

1 body {
2 margin: 0;
3 padding: 3em 0;
4 color: #fff;
5 background: #0080d2;
6 font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;
7 }
8
9 #container {
10 width: 600px;
11 background: #fff;
12 color: #555;
13 border: 3px solid #ccc;
14 -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
15 -moz-border-radius: 10px;
16 -ms-border-radius: 10px;
17 border-radius: 10px; 
18 border-top: 3px solid #ddd;
19 padding: 1em 2em;
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20 margin: 0 auto;
21 -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
22 -moz-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
23 -ms-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
24 box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
25 }
26
27 ul {
28 list-style: none;
29 padding: 0;
30 }
31
32 ul > li {
33 padding: 0.12em 1em
34 }
35
36 label {
37 display: block;
38 float: left;
39 width: 130px;
40 }
41
42 input, textarea {
43 font-family: Georgia, Serif;
44 }

Our "send free SMS" HTML code and CSS give us the following simple form:

The Script
The most important part of this is the PHP text message script. We'll write that bit of
code now:

1 <?php
2

3 if ( isset( $_REQUEST ) && !empty( $_REQUEST ) ) {
4 if (

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5 isset( $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'], $_REQUEST['carrier'], $_REQUEST['smsMessage'] ) &&

6 !empty( $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'] ) &&
7 !empty( $_REQUEST['carrier'] )
8 ) {
9 $message = wordwrap( $_REQUEST['smsMessage'], 70 );
10 $to = $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'] . '@' . $_REQUEST['carrier'];
11 $result = @mail( $to, '', $message );
12 print 'Message was sent to ' . $to;
13 } else {
14 print 'Not all information was submitted.';
15 }
16 }
17
18 ?>
19 <!DOCTYPE html>

The script first checks to see if the form has been submitted.
If yes, it checks to see if the phoneNumber , carrier , and smsMessage variables
were sent. This is useful in the case where there may be more than one form on
the page.
If phoneNumber , carrier , and smsMessage are available and phoneNumber and
carrier are not empty, it's okay to attempt to send the message.
The message argument in the mail function should be 70 characters in length per
line. We can chop the message into 70-character chunks using the wordwrap
function.
phoneNumber and carrier are concatenated, and then the message is sent using
the mail function.
If data is missing or it cannot be validated, the script simply returns Not all
information was submitted.
Finally, mail returns a boolean indicating whether it was successful or not. The
value is stored in $result in case I need to verify that the message was in fact
sent.

Note: The mail method only notifies whether the message was sent or not. It does not
provide a way to check to see if the message was successfully received by the recipient
server or mailbox.

The Final Code

1 <?php 
2
3 if ( isset( $_REQUEST ) && !empty( $_REQUEST ) ) {

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4 if (
5 isset( $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'], $_REQUEST['carrier'], $_REQUEST['smsMessage'] ) &&
6 !empty( $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'] ) &&
7 !empty( $_REQUEST['carrier'] )
8 ) {
9 $message = wordwrap( $_REQUEST['smsMessage'], 70 );
10 $to = $_REQUEST['phoneNumber'] . '@' . $_REQUEST['carrier'];
11 $result = @mail( $to, '', $message );
12 print 'Message was sent to ' . $to;
13 } else {
14 print 'Not all information was submitted.';
15 }
16 }

1 ?>
2 <!DOCTYPE html>
3 <head>
4 <meta charset="utf-8" />
5 <style>
6 body {
7 margin: 0;
8 padding: 3em 0;
9 color: #fff;
10 background: #0080d2;
11 font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;
12 }
13
14 #container {
15 width: 600px;
16 background: #fff;
17 color: #555;
18 border: 3px solid #ccc;
19 -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
20 -moz-border-radius: 10px;
21 -ms-border-radius: 10px;
22 border-radius: 10px;
23 border-top: 3px solid #ddd;
24 padding: 1em 2em;
25 margin: 0 auto;
26 -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
27 -moz-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
28 -ms-box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
29 box-shadow: 3px 7px 5px #000;
30 }
31
32 ul {
33 list-style: none;
34 padding: 0;
35 }
36
37 ul > li {
38 padding: 0.12em 1em
39 }
40
41 label {
42 display: block;
43 float: left; 
44 width: 130px;
45 }

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46
47 input, textarea {
48 font-family: Georgia, Serif;
49 }
50 </style>
51 </head>
52 <body>
53 <div id="container">
54 <h1>Sending SMS with PHP</h1>
55 <form action="" method="post">
56 <ul>
57 <li>
58 <label for="phoneNumber">Phone Number</label>
59 <input type="text" name="phoneNumber" id="phoneNumber" placeholder="385555016
60 <li>
61 <label for="carrier">Carrier</label>
62 <input type="text" name="carrier" id="carrier" />
63 </li>
64 <li>
65 <label for="smsMessage">Message</label>
66 <textarea name="smsMessage" id="smsMessage" cols="45" rows="15"></textarea>
67 </li>
68 <li><input type="submit" name="sendMessage" id="sendMessage" value="Send Messag
69 </ul>
70 </form>
71 </div>
72 </body>
73 </html>

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Troubleshooting

Localhost Error
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In order to use the mail function, you must have a mail server running. If you're
running this SMS PHP free script on a web host, you're probably okay. But if you're
unsure, I recommend talking to an administrator. This also holds true for personal
machines. So if you get errors like...

1 Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port

... you'll have to install and configure a mail server. This is out of the scope of this
tutorial. However, if you're working on your local machine, switching to something like
XAMPP might solve this problem. Alternatively, try installing Mercury Mail alongside
WAMP, MAMP, or on a LAMP (or SAMP or OAMP, etc.) system (that's a lot of 'AMPs').

PHPMailer
Another option (which is the method I prefer) is to use PHPMailer. Below is an example
of how to use PHPMailer to connect to Gmail's SMTP server and send the message.

Using it is as simple as including a class in your PHP send SMS script.

1 require 'class.phpmailer.php';
2
3 // Instantiate Class
4 $mail = new PHPMailer();
5
6 // Set up SMTP
7 $mail->IsSMTP(); // Sets up a SMTP connection
8 $mail->SMTPDebug = 2; // This will print debugging info
9 $mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Connection with the SMTP does require authorizati
10 $mail->SMTPSecure = "tls"; // Connect using a TLS connection
11 $mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
12 $mail->Port = 587;
13 $mail->Encoding = '7bit'; // SMS uses 7-bit encoding
14
15 // Authentication
16 $mail->Username = "email.address@gmail.com"; // Login
17 $mail->Password = "password"; // Password
18
19 // Compose
20 $mail->Subject = "Testing"; // Subject (which isn't required)
21 $mail->Body = "Testing"; // Body of our message
22
23 // Send To
24 $mail->AddAddress( "##########@vtext.com" ); // Where to send it
25 var_dump( $mail->send() ); // Send!


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This should print out something along the lines of:

It may take a little more to set up the connection, depending on your situation. If you're
planning on using PHP to send a text message free via Gmail, Google has provided
information on connecting.

Download SMS Message PHP Code From CodeCanyon

It's great that you now know how to send and receive a message in PHP with SMS
Sender. But SMS Sender isn't the only PHP script for sending SMS to mobile.
CodeCanyon is home to many other options that have this feature and more. Here are
just a few great choices for those hunting for SMS message PHP code.

1. XeroChat—Best Multichannel Marketing Application (SaaS

Platform)
XeroChat lets you send free SMS in PHP and a whole lot more. You can set up Facebook
Messenger chatbots, Instagram auto comment replies, ordering, and other marketing
functions. This PHP email to SMS platform perfect for a restaurant or eCommerce store.
If your business needs a single hub for marketing solutions, including a PHP send SMS
script, try XeroChat.

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2. Ultimate SMS—Bulk SMS Application For Marketing

Are you looking for a PHP send text message script that can handle bulk SMS? Then
you're looking for something like Ultimate SMS. It's a powerful PHP script for sending
SMS to mobile that's also user-friendly. You can build your own API to suit your needs,
and Ultimate also supports two-way SMS. There's even an option to create custom SMS
templates for common messages. It's a great option if sending SMS from a PHP website
to mobile is a priority for your new business.

3. Smart SMS and Email Manager (SSEM)

SSEM is another PHP to email SMS script that also does more for you. Create, send, and
schedule both SMS and emails for your project or business. These features make
marketing much easier. Thanks to the continued updates of the developers, the new
SSEM UI now makes this PHP send SMS script easier to use. If you're looking for PHP
code to send SMS to mobile from website for free, try out SSEM.

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4. SMS Gateway—Use Your Phone as SMS Gateway

You can send free SMS in PHP with the SMS Gateway script. It allows you to send bulk
messages through a CSV or Excel file. You can also use your phone as an SMS gateway.
Other features of this send SMS using PHP script include:

auto-responder
contact list creation
multilanguage support
delivery reports
messages in the admin panel 

Not a bad batch of features to have for a PHP send text message free script.

5. Nimble Messaging Professional SMS Marketing

Application For Business
We round out our list of SMS message PHP code with the comprehensive Nimble. This
free script to send SMS using PHP is perfect for digital marketing. Not only can you
send bulk SMS messages, but this script also has WhatsApp integration. Now you'll be
able to reach contacts with important messages on the platform of their choice. Use


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this PHP code to send SMS to mobile from website free script if you want to send deals
or product updates to customers.

Find More PHP Scripts From Envato Tuts+

If learning how to send SMS through PHP code makes you interested in downloading
more scripts, Envato Tuts+ is here for you. We've gathered some of the best PHP scripts
for different niches. You can check them out here:

12 Best CRM & Project

Management PHP Scripts
(With 3 Free)
Franc Lucas
22 Feb 2023

8 Best PHP CRUD

Generators and
Frameworks on
CodeCanyon
Franc Lucas
30 Jan 2023

13 Best PHP Email Forms

Esther Vaati
27 Aug 2021

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15 Best PHP Event

Calendar and Booking
Scripts... and 3 Free
Options
Monty Shokeen
27 Feb 2023

Conclusion
Learning how to send and receive a message in PHP can be simple. It's nice that there
are a myriad of methods to accomplish the task of sending an SMS through a web
application. This method is really meant for low-volume messaging (most likely less
than 1,000 text messages per month) and developers looking to get their feet wet
without forking out cash. Other options include:

Using an SMS Gateway Provider

Doing a Google search will return plenty of options.
Most SMS gateway providers include an API for sending messages through a
web application.
You can usually sign up for a service for a reasonable price, assuming you're
planning on sending at least 1,000 SMS messages per month.
You can rent a short code number.
Using a GSM modem
This can be a costly and slow way to do it, since you have to buy a modem
and have a contract with a wireless network.
You'll also have to use the AT (Hayes) command set.
Use a direct connection to a wireless network, which will require some strong
negotiating and a whole lot of money.

This tutorial is in no way a comprehensive review of how to send SMS through PHP
code, but it should get you started! I hope this PHP text message script tutorial has
been of interest to you. Thank you so much for reading!

If you still need help with this or any other PHP issue, try our free PHP tutorial, which
takes you through the fundamentals of PHP in a methodical, comprehensive set of
video classes. You can also learn more about PHP from the articles below.


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PHP Fundamentals
Jeremy McPeak
29 Oct 2021

How to Use PHP in HTML

Sajal Soni
26 Mar 2022

How to Install PHP on

Windows
Sajal Soni
16 Jul 2020

How to Autoload Classes

With Composer in PHP
Sajal Soni
19 Aug 2020

This post has been updated with contributions from Nathan Umoh. Nathan is a staff
writer for Envato Tuts+.

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Kevin Jensen

My name is Kevin Jensen. I love video games and love making them. I want to
share that love. This site/blog is devoted to sharing my thoughts about video
games and also information about making video games. I do this in hopes of
helping others to achieve their dreams of also making games.

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