I don't have an answer for your problem, but I have been in a similar situation and will offer this:

Recently, I wrote an application that sends me a text message to let me know when my hockey teams are playing so I remember to record the games on my PVR. I had problems with emailing the messages, so I got myself a Twilio account. I put $20 (CAN) on the account two months ago, and it's still going strong. It costs me ~$1 per month for the phone number, and $0.0158 per each text message sent.

The Twilio account is extremely easy to use with Perl. Just install SMS::Send::Twilio, and then:

use warnings;
use strict;

use SMS::Send;

my $twilio_sender = SMS::Send->new(
   'Twilio',
    _accountsid => 'API account ID',
    _authtoken  => 'API auth token',
    _from       => '+Your Twilio phone number'
);

my $sent = $twilio_sender->send_sms(
    text => "Hey stevieb!",
    to   => "+phone_number"
);

if (! $sent) {
    warn "Couldn't send message!";
}
[download]

A huge benefit is that because it's a completely separate phone number than my personal one, it shows up in my text messages on my iPhone as a completely different entity (ie. you can create a label/contact for it so it doesn't end up in a text thread to/from yourself).