You may wonder why would anyone want to forward text messages or missed call notifications to their email account when the cell phone is with them all the time? Won’t these messages add more noise to an overflowing email Inbox?

Not so. For instance, some of my friends work in a company where, for security reasons, they aren’t allowed to carry personal mobile phones inside though they do have regular phones at their desk and are allowed email access. They would therefore leave the phone at home but with auto-forwarding enabled, they’ll get an email alert as soon as someone sends them an SMS or calls on their cell during office hours.

Such a feature may also be handy for people who have recently switched to a different phone number and would like to keep track of all incoming calls and messages received on their previous phone but without having to carry it all the time.

The Android Market has dozens of apps that can bring the auto-forwarding feature to your mobile phone but the one that I like most is SMS2Gmail. It says “SMS” but the app can forward both SMS text messages and missed calls to your email address. You will get the complete message text in your email and the sender’s name as well provided that that number already exists in your phonebook.

It takes just one step to get it up and running. Launch the app, provide the credentials of your Gmail account and done. It needs the Google credentials in order to send email notifications but if that doesn’t make you too happy, just create another Gmail account and set it to auto-forward messages to your primary email account.

One more thing. You turn on email notifications manually but in a situation where you have have forgotten the phone at home, or have misplaced it somewhere, you can remotely activate auto-forwarding by sending an SMS from any another phone to your phone.

The app lets you assign an Activation Keyword (see screenshot) and as soon as a text arrives with that keyword, the auto-forwards will be enabled automatically.

Also see: Backup your SMS Text Message to Gmail