So fucking apparently, you can text a phone through email! Yeah, TIL about something called sms gateways, which most mobile providers have, which allow you to essentially email the phone number, and have a text message delivered to that number. For example, I have MetroPCS so mine would be

6666666666@mymetropcs.com

Fucking amazing!

I think NASA uses that to tell you when the iss is above you

This is old school, back when MMS was a thing, actually, probably even before then, we had email before we had MMS.

didn't work

This used to work, but these days most mobile phone providers have turned this off.

What year is this?!

Wait, SMS is still a thing? Nonetheless, that's pretty cool! Are there costs involved with it?
... Also I think that this might be within the realm of possibilities of a mail server and an esp8266 or an Arduino with Ethernet shield, hooked up to a SIM card module 🤔 or even just an esp8266 that connects to Gmail or something like that, to omit the need of a mail server.

These endpoints are often used by SMS API gateways, though, here in Belgium, most are now disabled and replaced by actual API endpoints.

We still use an sms gateway, but we hired a company for the service. I've had to deal with it a few times though, because it's not always reliable.