help with SMS... completely at sea

Factual Questions
1

So an acquaintance I have to meet this evening in Porto, Portugal, has sent me what looks like a phone number and asked me to text him. Did I mention I’ve never done this before in my life? Yes, mock me.

I went through a great deal of annoying rigmarole via MSN and whatnot before it became clear that I could not from here (A Coruña, Spain) make it so that I could text him via MSN Messenger (I can’t buy the SMS service as a Canadian, nor can I use a Canadian credit card from Spain), nor via SMS.ac (as you apparently have to have your cellphone with you, which I do not.)

Is there any other way, given a phone number, as a complete newbie to send a text message to someone?

2

You might be able to do it with ICQ, perhaps?

3

I know it’s not the answer you want but couldn’t you just call them rather than go through all this trouble?

In order to text him you’ll need a cellphone, which you don’t have, but some operators allow you to text from their websites and you get billed normally for it the service.

4

try looking at http://www.textmefree.com/, or if that doesn’t work and you get desperate, you can email the message to me, and I’ll send it on.

5

I’d go up to one of the dozens of people you see in cafes banging their thumbs on their phones and ask their indulgence. Or ask the desk clerk in your hotel, who almost certainly spends the night shift texting his buddies. In short, I wouldn’t bother to try to open my own account to send the message, just get someone else to send it ask provide the recipient with some alternative channel for future messages.

6

If you can send email, you can send text messages to nearly any SMS-capable cell phone.

The trick is knowing what email address to send to.

And that requires knowing what cell phone company the recipient is using (not just their phone number). Though I expect you could figure that out from the phone number. Then you have to find out how to address the text message to get it to their phone. Usually it’s something like “800-555-1212@phonecompany.com”, but there are often prefix characters required. And it varies for the different cellphone companies.

Also, this might be more difficult since you are overseas and there would seem to be 3 countries (Canada, Spain, & Portugal) involved.

But sending an email SMS text message should be possible.