Keep your free temporary phone numbers active with IFTTT

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Temporary phone numbers are popular these days and for good reasons. They give you privacy and are a convenience to use for non-personal purposes. But as free, numbers expire if you do not use them within a period. The trick here is to use a service that can send timely SMS to your phone number to keep it from expiring. IFTTT‘s SMS service to the rescue. You can get a few notifications to your temporary number which imitate activity on your account and keeps your temporary phone number from expiring.

ifttt sms service

If you get a temporary phone number from an app, you are obviously going to use them only when you complicitly need them. But there are times when you may not have a use for it or while you’re on vacation. Now you don’t want the number to expire because spent too much time choosing a special number.

SMS Alert through IFTTT

The steps are fairly simple:

  1. Signup on the IFTTT site or login.
  2. Setup SMS settings with your temporary number.
  3. Create a new applet, or choose an applet that sends you SMS
  4. Configure applet or turn the applet on.
  5. You’re done.

I use this on a temporary phone number service that has a web application, so I do not use the app the service provides. The apps are generally asking a lot of permissions which you can avoid using a web-based app.

Temporary phone numbers keeps your private number separate from anything suspicious or irritating. So it’s nice to have them. You can separate out your personal life from work or other reasons. Many services offer free temporary phone numbers which provide free texting or calling. TextFree, Next+ are some of the apps I’ve tried. Both of which deactivate numbers after a brief period of dormancy.

Let us know what you think about this neat little trick. If you have any other options to keep the numbers alive, we’d love to hear them as well.

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