SMS Feature on Gmail launched in India

TNI Bureau: Gmail users in India now can send text messages to mobile phones via their Gmail Chat, as Google launched the service with effect from 10^th October. Using the service, one can send up to 50 SMSs in 24 hours. The SMS via GChat is now available for India and 51 other countries in Asia, Africa and North America.

The process of this service is that – one need to click on a contact in the chat panel and then on the ‘down’ arrow next to the Email button. Now, an option will pop up on the screen that will allow him to send an SMS. The next step is – Click on that option and type the mobile number of the contact and sends it. The SMS response you receive for the messages sent via GChat will be stored in your chat history as well.

However, the GTalk app is available only on desktops and PCs for now and not with computers or Smartphone.

At the beginning the service will allow SMSs up to 50 only.  That means, for every message you send, your credit will decrease by one. But for each message received in response to the SMS sent via Gchat, your credit goes up by five texts. However, the maximum credit remains 50.

Another important point  – Once you send too many messages from web to mobile and the recipient number does not responds, the web user will get blocked from sending SMS messages. Google has put this measure to check spamming or harassing people.

Users can also buy more number of SMS credits, by sending an SMS to their own phone and replying to that, in case the free text credit reaches zero.

Also a user is free to block SMSs from GChat from a particular contact at his wish. All he need to do is to reply BLOCK against the received message. Of course later the service can also be opened again by sending ‘UNBLOCK’ to the number.

Further, if altogether you don’t want people to send you SMSs from Gchat, you can text ‘STOP’ to +918082801060 and to reactive the services just send a SMS ‘START’ to the same number.

Currently, eight major mobile service operators in India will support this Gmail SMS service. They are: Aircel, Idea, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata indicom and Vodafone.