Receive SMS Messages from Your Friends

With ipipi, your friends, family, or business partners can send you SMS messages, even if you don't own a mobile phone. You and your friends can also save money by using ipipi for your international text messaging.

How does it work?

Your friends send SMS messages to our service, and we'll send it to you, either by email or to your phone. Since your friends can send to a gateway number close to them, they can save money on international rates.

How do you receive SMS from your friends?

Receiving SMS is a two step process.

1. The first step happens within the network your friend is using. In order for you to receive messages your friend's wireless operator must be able to deliver messages to at least one of our SMS gateway numbers. Sometimes, your friends may not be able to send messages to our gateways at all (for example, this happens when their wireless service plan does not include international SMS messaging). This is sometimes the case with prepaid accounts. In this case your friend must contact his wireless operator and ensure that he can send SMS to one of our gateways.
2. The second step occurs when we receive the message. As soon as it is received our service authenticates is and if all is OK it will direct it to your Inbox or forward it someplace else (as per your forwarding rules). Please note that at least one of the conditions below must be true for an incoming message to be directed to your account:
   1. You must have sent a message to this number in the last 7 days, or
   2. You must have registered your friend's number with your account, or
   3. Your friend must have used your smsIN

Your friends can either directly reply to SMS messages you send to them, or can originate SMS messages on their own.

Troubleshooting

In some cases, direct reply does not work. If you experience this, please ask your friends to type a new message (not reply to your message) and send it to one of the gateways.

For business clients, we also offer dedicated virtual SMS numbers for volume incoming messaging.