With SMS (Short Message Services) the lines between emails and texts are becoming even more blurred.  This is great news for anyone without a smartphone or in an area without 3G or WiFi who needs to be able to receive email messages on the go or be able to receive and respond to email alerts quickly.

If you have a cell phone and a service provider that provides texting services, then you have everything you need to start getting emails as texts.  Your new address will start with your phone number without any punctuation.  For example, 123-456-7890 would need to be 1234567890.  Following that would be the usual "@" symbol - and then the SMS ending (or 'Gateway') which varies carrier to carrier.  Verizon customers end with "vtext.com" for example.  In this case, the full address would look like this:

1234567890@vtext.com

For a full list of carrier gateways check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways.

Contacts can either send emails directly to this address, or you could set up email forwarding to this new address whenever you're going to be away from a computer.  Regardless, now there's no reason everyone can't have access to emails on the go without having to pay for a media plan and a smart phone.  Of course, SMS has a limit of 160 characters (hence the word 'Short' in it's name), so you won't be able to read all the novel-like emails from your great aunt Betty, but that's more of a pro than a con anyway.