I liked the SMS notifications that the google calendar provided. I pay way more attention to SMS messages then I do email message. So when Google disabled the SMS feature on June 27th 2015 I was disappointed. However Google provides a hack via gmail with it’s forwarding feature and the email to SMS connection provided by all the carriers.
It may take a few minutes to setup but once setup sending an SMS alert is as easy as adding “SMSALERT” to the title of any calendar event and having it sent to your gmail email account at the specific time you want the alert.
Here is the flow.
1. Google Calendar sends alert to a Gmail account with a subject that includes “SMSALERT”. Just make sure your calendar event sends you an email to a Gmail account when you want the SMS alert to arrive.
2. Setup Gmail to have a filter that forwards the email to your cell phone carriers email to SMS gateway when “SMSALERT” is found in the subject of the email. The cell phone email address is usually your cell phone number @ carrier gateway .com. Here is a list email formats for email to SMS gateways for most carriers http://www.emailtextmessages.com/
So the setup process is very straight forward.
1. Go to your Gmail account that is associated with your calendar.
2. Select the gear button on the right.
3. Select settings from the menu.
4. Choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
5. Click Add Forwarding Address (follow the process to add a forwarding address to your phones SMS email gateway) This is usually is your phone_number@carrier_email_gateway.com. You can find your carrier SMS to email gateway for most carriers here http://www.emailtextmessages.com/.
6. Now setup a Gmail Filter so any message with a subject that contains “SMSALERT” will be forwarded to your SMS gateway email address you setup in step #5. Choose Filter and Blocked Addresses tab from Gmail settings.
5. Choose Create New Filter
6. In the Subject field. Enter our trigger word “SMSALERT” without quotes. This tells Gmail to look for any email that contains SMSALERT in the subject.
7. Click Create Filter With This Search.
8. Check Forward To This Address and select your SMS email gateway address from the drop down.
9. Click Create Filter
Now any email sent to your gmail account that has the keyword “SMSALERT” in the subject will be forward to your cell phone as an SMS message.
When setting up a Google calendar event that you want to be sent to your cell phone via SMS. You must do two things.
1. enter the keyword SMSALERT in the calendar title.
2. make sure an email notification is being sent to the gmail account that has your SMS to email gateway filter at the specified time.
When the time comes the
– Google calendar will send an email alert to your Gmail account.
– Your Gmail filter will see the keyword SMSALERT in the subject and forward the message to your cell phone as SMS.
You could provide a little security by choosing a different keyword then the one I choose for this example. You also could use the Gmail filter rules to allow only message from google to be accepted by this filter.
I hope you find this simple hack a great workaround for the disabled SMS in Googles calendar. And that is makes your life a little easier to get the SMS notifications from the Google calendar.