Forward SMS to email automatically from Android

2026-09-12

Carriers used to offer SMS-to-email as a network feature. Most have quietly dropped it, and the ones that still have it forward only to one address and only in their own format. If you want the texts that land on a phone to arrive in a mailbox — yours, a shared support address, a ticketing system that turns emails into tickets — the reliable way today is an app on the phone that does the forwarding itself.

Here is how to set that up with Pushferry, what you can filter, and what happens to the text along the way.

Why email, specifically

Email is the destination that works everywhere. A ticketing tool (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout) will turn a forwarded SMS into a ticket. A shared mailbox lets a whole team see customer texts without anyone holding the phone. A Gmail filter can label bank codes and archive them. And unlike a chat channel, email keeps a searchable record by default.

Setup

1. Create a free account at app.pushferry.com and confirm your address. 2. Install the Pushferry app on the Android phone with the SIM you want to forward (download). Pair it with the code the dashboard shows under Devices. 3. Grant the SMS permissions the app asks for, and allow it to run in the background when prompted — that second step is what keeps forwarding alive overnight on Xiaomi, Samsung and similar phones. 4. In the dashboard open Forwarding → Add a forwarding rule, choose Email as the destination and enter the address. 5. Save, then send a text to the phone. The email should arrive within a minute.

Every SMS the phone receives from now on is emailed with the sender's number in the subject and the full text in the body.

Filters that make it useful

• Only certain senders — your bank, a courier, one customer. A number, a short code, or a sender name; partial matches are fine.
• Only texts containing a word — "code", "delivery", "appointment". Regular expressions are supported when a plain word is not precise enough.
• Only one SIM on a dual-SIM phone.
• Several rules at once: codes to your own address, customer texts to support@, everything to an archive mailbox.

A note on delivery and privacy

Email is the one destination Pushferry's servers send on the phone's behalf — a phone has no trustworthy way to send mail that will not be rejected as spam. So for email rules the text passes through Pushferry's mail server in memory and is not written to storage. For every other destination (Slack, Discord, webhooks, another number) the phone sends directly and the text never reaches Pushferry at all. Either way, what the dashboard keeps is a log of when a message arrived and whether the delivery worked, not the words.

Emails are sent from Pushferry's own domain with proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), so they land in the inbox rather than the spam folder. If you forward to a ticketing system, use the address it gave you for incoming mail and the SMS becomes a ticket with the sender's number in the subject line.

Forwarding to more than one place

Email does not have to be the only destination. The same incoming text can go to email for the record and to Slack for attention, or to a webhook that feeds your own system. Each destination is its own rule with its own filters, and a message that matches several rules is delivered to each of them.

If it stops working

Nine times out of ten the phone has put the app to sleep. Open the app, check the phone status screen, and if it warns about the battery saver, tap Allow background work. On Xiaomi, Huawei and Oppo phones also switch on autostart for the app in the phone's settings — those brands re-enable the restriction after some system updates.

The other common cause is a filter that is stricter than intended: keyword filters are case-sensitive unless you begin them with (?i).