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Ask HN: Is there an online service which gives you a personal number for SMS?

3 points by nile-crocodile ↗ HN
This seems to be a heavily SEO-spammed topic, and most may be after easy access to countless of phone numbers for evil-related purposes.

I only need a private number for receiving SMS, no need for calling and sending messages. A monthly or yearly fee isn't a concern. The main purpose is to protect my own phone number from spam, unwanted promotion and data breaches. Local retailers commonly require a phone number when ordering online and some seem to only send parcel information there. Certain websites do demand a number when creating an account.

In the past I've bought prepaid plans (which expire after six months), but would prefer a streamlined approach. Preferably would support email notifications (and RSS) for arrived SMS.

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
Skype Skype-In can receive and send text messages but it may be worth noting that most of the web hosted SMS groups of numbers are flagged as such and many bigger businesses will not accept them any more. The number of businesses rejecting them is growing monthly which means some here will state that they have been using one for years but if they tried to set up new accounts may be surprised to find it no longer works. Some small online stores appear to still accept them.

My theory is that this is due to all the abuse and fraud of online disposable numbers and this is why we can't have nice things.

salawat
More like:

People have an obsession with making "blacklists" but never go through the prcess of resampling to confirm continued malicious use, or actually providing a point for getting off the list.

Negative externalities are for someone else to deal with.

LinuxBender
You could be right but I've had the same VoIP numbers for decades so if the individual numbers were part of a blacklist that would imply I did something malicious which I know I have not. AFAIK they blacklist entire NPA/NSX ranges known to be VoIP.
mikequinlan
I know that Google isn't thought very highly of here, but Google Voice provides a free phone number with a lot more capability than this.

https://voice.google.com