The Gmail SMS went live October 10 for Indian users along with 50 other countries in Asia, Africa and North America. In addition, the service enable users to send SMSes to mobile phones from chat windows. Users have to add mobile numbers of their contacts in the email address book and they are set.
However, using the free Gmail SMS service users can effortlessly send text messages to mobile phones via their Gmail Chat window. To send text, users need to add mobile numbers of their contacts in the e-mail address book. Replies to the SMS will appear as replies in Gmail Chat and conversations will be stored in users’ Chat history, like regular chats.
According to several reports, the service is also being rolled out for paid e-mail Google Apps customers in India. Although, Google India has not officially disclosed the new initiative yet, however several Gmail users have reported about receiving a notification about the new service as seen in the image below.
Some of the nifty features of the service is that users are initially given a credit of fifty messages and for every message sent the credit decreases by one and for each message received in response to a text message sent via Gmail Chat, the user’s credit increases by five, up to a maximum of 50. Besides, when the SMS credit goes down to zero, one credit is added after 24 hours. Google has built in the credit limit to prevent misuse of its free SMS service for marketing/spamming.
On the other hand, those who do not wish to receive SMSs sent from Gmail Chat can block future messages from the sender by replying to the message with the word ‘BLOCK’ and later if they wish to continue receiving messages they can reply to the message with ‘UNBLOCK’.
Moreover, if Gmail Chat SMS recipients in India do not wish to receive any messages on SMS from any Gmail user, they can stop the service from sending them messages by texting ‘STOP’ to +918082801060. In order to reactivate the service they can SMS ‘START’ to the same number.
Google is rolling out the service in association with eight major cellular operators as follows: Aircel, Idea, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata Indicom and Vodafone (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal & Andaman and Nicobar, Assam, North East).
As a matter of fact, this latest partnership hints that the operators would also receive a share revenue from Google’s SMS service.
This feature is not yet available on the Google Talk app, also referred to as GTalk, installed on computers. Google’s support page for SMS chat in Gmail lists all mobile operators as available.