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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Haven't looked into this in a long time, but every cell carrier used to have a gateway address where you could send an email, using the destination phone number as part of the address, and the gateway would dispatch an SMS with pretty much arbitrary envelope information. You just needed a list of active gateways. I think I even have some old php code lying around that I used to spoof my friends' phone numbers to each other and generate a text thread where one came out and said he'd left his wife because he was secretly in love with the other dude. I know, real mature use of technology.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateway#Email_clients

There's a list here.

This was a lot of fun! I've definitely done the PHP spoof haha, if I can find the code I'll link it here.

However, last I checked, those email-to-SMS gateways were shut down to prevent spam :(

Dunno how old you are but back in the analog cellphone days I had my mom's clunky old flip phone lying around, I was 14 or so and followed some instructions off a BBS. If you put a piece of tin foil between two of the battery contacts you could get the phone into debug mode and you could punch in any channel number and just listen in on it. I lived near a freeway, so I would spend hours in the backyard eavesdropping on people's conversations as they drove by and faded in and out of range. You had to be quiet, because if they were close enough to pick up your signal they could hear you too. Dudes arguing with their wives, drug deals, it was quite an education. The shortwave radio receiver my parents bought me as a birthday present gathered dust in the closet.

That is a life-changing hack right there! Reminds me of an old glitch I experienced in the early Nokias that allowed the receiver of a call to listen-in on the line before answering.

> Reminds me of an old glitch I experienced in the early Nokias that allowed the receiver of a call to listen-in on the line before answering.

Do you happen to remember the model of that Nokia? I had a guy in high school show this to me once, but nobody believed me when I told them! I knew I wasn't crazy haha

reminds me of my antics

I used to use the radio to to pick up cordless phones (ie a normal phone with a base station, with the huge phones with big antennas), AM if I rememeber rightly, right towards one end of the dial

this kept me entertained for far too long for an 8-10 year old..

I used this back in the day when I had an iPhone 3G and no SMS plan. I used an app that allowed a text like interface for email and then created an apple script that went through my contacts to look up their carrier and add their gateway address to their contact card. Looked weird to them to see a text from vividsiphone@ymail.com, but it worked!

We use that gateway email address with our notification alert system at $WORK. Only problem is if our internet/ power goes down, no notifications will arrive to our devices either way (email or email-to-SMS).

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