If you have suddenly started receiving odd, unexplained text messages that start with the term “BREW” in them, it’s not an advertisement for beer gone awry. They may come from 47205, from 9114, or from some other number you don’t recognize, but believe it for not, they aren’t spam. They usually start with strings of characters such as //BREW:01095caa or similar. BREW stands for “Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless”, and is a 3rd-party application development system for mobile phones that is used by some apps and other programs.

As text messaging grows ever more popular, you may be wondering how to send text messages to cell phones via the Internet or, put another way, how to send a text message to a cell phone by email. It’s actually very easy to email a text message to a cell phone – in fact it’s as easy as sending any other email – you just need to know the email address of the cell phone.