As a solutions architect at Twilio, I have the opportunity to speak with customers on a daily basis. Each customer has unique requirements and in many cases, a customer is trying to enable SMS notifications for legacy systems that only support email. These customers quickly realize that sending an email to <phone number>@<wireless carrier>.com doesn’t scale.

Even though creating an application to handle email-to-SMS is very straightforward, the pushback I receive from customers is that they don’t want to maintain a server to host it. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a serverless Email to SMS gateway using a combination of Twilio SendGrid and AWS Lambda.

How does this SMS gateway work?

SendGrid accepts the inbound email and triggers a HTTP POST to our AWS API gateway. The payload of the POST request is then processed by Lambda. Using the Twilio helper library, an outbound SMS …