Android :: Motorola Droid - Programmatically Send SMS To Email

I was wondering if anyone knew the proper way to send an SMS message to an e-mail address using Verizon's CDMA Motorola Droid phone. The internal messaging application appears to automagically do this. While 3rd party applications like SMSPopup don't seem to be able to properly reply to e-mail addresses unless you compose the message inside the messaging application. When the internal messaging application sends a SMS message there's a corresponding 'RIL_REQUEST_CDMA_SEND_SMS' entry in the logcat (adb logcat -b radio). When you send a SMS to an e-mail address it prints the same thing, so behind the scenes it looks as though it is sending an sms. The interesting thing is that if you look at the content provider sent box the messages are addressed to various 1270XX-XXX-XXXX numbers.

On other services you can send email addresses by sending a SMS to a predefined short sms number. And then formatting your SMS as emailaddress subject message
i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateway#Carrier-Provided_SMS_to_E-Mail_Gateways
For example, using T-mobile's number (500) you can send a SMS to an e-mail using the following:
SmsManager smsMgr = SmsManager.getDefault();
smsMgr.sendTextMessage("500", null, "username@domain.com message sent to an e-mail address from a SMS", null, null);
It is possible to programatically send SMS to email messages from a CDMA Android phone? Does Verizon actually send your replies as SMS messages or are they actually sent as MMS or normal http email messages? Any ideas about how to intercept what the raw message being sent to see what's going on? It might be possible that Verizon somehow generates a fake number temporarily tied to an e-mail address (since repeated messages are not sent to the same number). But, that seems pretty heavy handed.