How to Forward Text Messages to Your Email

Despite the rise of texting and instant messaging apps, email remains a tried and true electronic communications mode that continues to be important to many users. Using email has a number of advantages over text messaging in three very important respects.

First, while it can be deleted, email is generally stored more persistently than text messages are, whether on an email server or on a local computer. Text messages can be saved in a similar fashion, but most smartphone SMS apps have fixed storage quotas, and once those quotas are reached, messages have to be deleted for the app to continue working.

Second, emails can be much longer than text messages, and since it is usually composed on a full-sized keyboard, the messages are easier to create. Finally, email is a more secure place for communication than text messaging, with the ability to send emails completely anonymously.

Because text messages are temporary—at least to the user—it’s important to keep your texts organized in a safe place. The best way to store and organize important texts is to entrust them to the other messaging platform and send them to your email account. In addition to forwarding your important texts to email, you may also want to take screenshots of important texts.

Fortunately, you can forward text messages to email fairly easily on most devices. In this article, I’ll show you how to forward a text to an email on Android and iPhone, how to forward Whatsapp messages to email, and how to use Google Voice as a texting service.

Forwarding Texts to Your Email

There are basically two different ways to forward text messages to your email. You can either use an app to automatically forward some or all your messages silently without you doing anything, or you can forward individual messages by hand. I’ll show you all of your options for both the Android and iPhone platforms.

How Do I Forward a Text Message to my Email on Android?

If you own an Android phone and want to forward messages to your email account, there are a number of free apps on the Google Play Store which will do this for you.

One of the best-reviewed and free apps with the most features is called “Textra” and it works extremely well. You might also find this app to be useful for synchronizing your texts between platforms, such as between your phone and your laptop.

Textra allows you to create configurable filters for forwarding messages. You can choose to forward messages only when connected to Wi-Fi, only when in your home network, or even when you are roaming.

You can specify the address where you want to send the messages; you can also forward to another phone number if you wish, and you can choose the contacts you want to forward messages from. It’s a very powerful package and it will get the job done for you.

How Do I Manually Forward Text to Email on Android?

If you don’t want to archive all your messages, but instead just to send an occasional text to your email, then you can just manually forward. To manually forward a text message on Android, all you need to do is tap “Forward” within your text messaging app, and in the destination or recipient field, enter an email address where you would normally add a phone number.

Open the text thread you want to forward.

Select “Share” (or “Forward“) and select “Message.” Add an email address where you would normally add a phone number. Tap “Send.”

As long as you have data and/or MMS capability on your plan, this should work fine. Depending on your network, delivery might take a few minutes, though. The option to share will vary depending on the messaging app that you use. Android is a versatile operating system if you’re using a third-party text app the instructions may differ.

How Do I Forward a Text Message to My Email on My iPhone?

While it’s not as simple as an Android because there aren’t any good third-party apps to download, there are ways to forward a text to an email. Being able to forward one or more messages manually on your iPhone may do the trick for you.

Here’s how to manually forward text messages to email on your iPhone:

1. Open Messages, and open the thread with the message you want to forward.
2. Tap and hold the message until a pop-up appears. Tap More… at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap the round checkbox next to each message you want to forward.
4. Tap the arrow in the lower right corner.
5. Enter the “To” email address you want to forward to
6. Tap the send arrow that’s on the right side of the message to send and that’s it.

Depending on your network, it might take a little time for the message to arrive in your inbox but it should get there.

You may also want to set up text message forwarding, which works on any iOS device such as an iPhone or iPad, as well as macOS. While this is not the same as forwarding to email, keeping messages in more than one place automatically can help:

1. Open the Settings app
2. Then tap Messages
3. Next, tap Text Message Forwarding
4. Toggle the device you want to forward to on. The device list will include any other Apple devices you have.

Using Google Voice as a Texting Service

One option to consider (particularly if you have iOS and thus no app to handle this task for you) is to get a free Google Voice number and use it as a text number. You can install the Google Voice app on Android or iOS. Google Voice will store your text messages indefinitely, giving you an email-like archival capacity.

In addition, Google Voice Finally, if none of the above options work for you, consider getting a free Google Voice number. To set up text forwarding, login to your Google Voice account and tap or click on the Settings menu.

Under settings, find the Messages section, and toggle “Forward messages to email” on and enter the address you want to use. It’s as simple as that to set up forwarding text messages to email using Google Voice.

Forwarding WhatsApp Messages to Your Email

Should you so desire, you can also forward WhatsApp messages to an email address. If you were being exceptionally funny during a chat and want to save the evidence or have a selection of images, GIFs, or videos you want to keep, you can save all of your WhatsApp conversations to email.

Based on our most recent tests in November of 2020, this method only works with the iOS app, not Android. The additional share icon in iOS allows us to send the message to an email address whereas the Android app does not give us that option.

Send an individual WhatsApp message to an email address:

1. Open the conversation that contains the message you want to forward in WhatsApp.
2. Tap and hold the message, then tap “Forward.”
3. Tap the share icon in the lower right corner.
4. Type in the email address and tap the send button.

Send an entire WhatsApp message thread to an email address:

1. Open the conversation that contains the message you want to forward in WhatsApp.
2. Tap the name of the person or group you are chatting with at the top of the screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom and tap “Export Chat.“
4. Tap “Mail,” enter the email address, and tap the send button.

According to WhatsApp, you can include up to 10,000 messages in a single text file, but you might not want to wait that long. It would take forever to find the one you’re looking for in a file of that size!