No, what Jim is talking about is using the Email channel. It doesn’t involve your normal email client, but rather sending directly to a server.
I’ve never done it, but I believe you can send SMS messages thru a web service like Twillio. It should be possible to write a Panorama program to access their web API. though this would require a bit of programming experience. Using a service like this isn’t going to be free, but I think they can send text messages with just the number, you don’t have to know the carrier.
There are other similar services as well, probably a google search for SMS API would turn up a list.