Google Voice now forwards SMS to email

Being able to read and reply to incoming text messages makes Google Voice pretty convenient, but it just got even better. Now you can have SMS messages forwarded to your email account, and reply from your voice number via email, too. You can enable the feature in your Google Voice settings under Voicemail and SMS. Third-party services have been doing things like this for a while, but Google Voice does it at no charge, through a service you already use.

Getting SMS by email has plenty of advantages. The biggest of these is that you can turn off SMS to your phone, so you're not paying for it, and read messages by email instead. You don't have to keep separate Voice and Gmail windows open to read text messages and email in your browser anymore, either. Also, you can file your texts in the same inbox as your Google Voice voicemail, so all of your incoming phone-related messages have one unified location. Finally, if you're using a threaded email client (like Gmail, as Google helpfully points out), your sms conversations will be threaded, too.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: email, forwarding, google voice, GoogleVoice, sms, text messaging, TextMessaging