w&w, X10: Sounds like the question is “Is there a difference between sending a text message (aka SMS) or an email?”

First, we apologize for the confusion. Thanks for bearing with our scrappy system.

The answer to the above question, from our point of view, is no. It does not matter how you send the email. All of these mechanisms are fine: sending an email from a smart phone; sending a SMS from a non-smart phone that does texting to emails behind the scenes; and sending an email from a computer.

Here is my guess as to what is going on. On non-smart phones, some carriers permit the sending of SMS to email because the phone or carrier does the transformation behind the scenes. The carrier, eg Verizon, has its own SMS gateway that takes the SMS and sends an email to the desired destination. In this case, the email will look like it originates from @vtext.com. When our system sends the email response to @vtext.com, the carrier’s server creates a SMS to send back to you-phone-number.

On smart phones, you can send emails directly and thus do not need a fake SMS-to-email service behind the scenes. I don’t know much about different phones or phone carriers, so your feedback here is important.

I’m still collating the log files from the event, and will give a shout out when we have statistics and improvements.

quick (stoopid?) question: my phone (an iphone) doesn’t seem to let me send a text to an address containing an @ sign. is there an SMS address for bilumi that doesn’t include an @? or, perhaps better, is there something i should know about my iphone that i don’t?

that said, i _was_ able to send an email, which worked in a jiffy!