[SOLVED] SMS zimlet?

[jreinhart]

Hi,

Does anyone know of a zimlet that allows you to send a text message to a cell phone...without having to use a 3rd party service that you have to pay for?

Thanks,

- Jesse

[Baylink]

A zimlet? No.


But you can still use teleflip.com to send SMS to and from cell's as email.

NPANXXXXXX@teleflip.com

[ab5602]

Well, the SMS sending piece is not the hard part, it's who is going to send it for you for free. Without being scammed, you're probably going to need to find and SMS aggregator to send these, but it's going to cost you some $$$. The various carriers (T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, etc..) negotiate various sending rights with SMS aggregators. These SMS aggregators own Short Codes: CSCA - SMS, MMS, short codes, text message marketing, mobile advertising, wireless campaigns, cell phone contests, mobile coupons, mobile alerts, text message advertising, broadcast messages, mobile API, SMS advertising, SMS marketing, short code, mo, and these aggregators have negotiated agreements with various cell companies..

In general, SMS senders are organized as:

- Tier 1) Have direct agreements with major cellular providers to send SMS
- Tier 2) Negotiate agreements with Tier-1 providers to send SMS messages
- Tier 3) Offer public, often spammy services through tier 2 providers

In short, all SMS messages comes from:

1) A cellphone. To automate slow sending from a cell phone, see a device like: FoxBox However, most carriers nowadays, limit the # of outgoing messages from a cell SIM.
2) A tier-2/3 SMS aggregator with a ShortCode that you can borrow. For an example, see: Aerialink your Enterprise. Some companies like this offer products called a "shared shortcode", which comes with a use agreement.

The SMS market is a racket. You will likely find some companies who are willing to send SMS from you for free, however, they are likely to collect the same phone numbers you send to, for their own spammy purposes.

Hope this helps!
-Rob

[jreinhart]

A friend worked this out and sent it to me. It works! All you have to do is create the correct contacts in Zimbra and send to it...you can send to cell phone AND receive to Zimbra.

If you ever need to send a text message to someone on their cell phone from e-mail and receive the response back to e-mail, here is how to do it.


First, find out what carrier they have. Every carrier provides an e-mail box that is associated with a telephone number. For the “To:” address in an e-mail message, enter their 10-digit phone number without dashes or parenthesis and the e-mail box domain name for their provider.


(I did look for a utility on the Internet that allows you determine which provider any cell phone has, but telephone numbers are transferred around, so there is no way to know. You may have to call the person to find out.)


When you send a message to a cell phone e-mail address, the person will receive a text message with your e-mail address in the header. If they respond, it will come back to your e-mail account.


Warning – Your message must be sent as a simple text message and not as an HTML document that has formatting in it. If you send it with formatting, the message they get will be garbled. When you are composing a message in Zimbra, click on the tab “Options” at the top of the message window and choose the option “Format As Plain Text”. If it is sent with the “Format AS HTML” option selected, it will be unreadable on the person's cell phone.


AT&T
yourphonenumber@txt.att.net

T-mobile USA
yourphonenumber@tomail.net

Verizon Wireless
yourphonenumber@vtext.com

Sprint PCS
yourphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com

[Baylink]

Courtesy of paging software vendor NotePage, here's a list of 237 such email addresses.

As always, remember: no signature, no HTML, and 160 character max, usually. And because they get that 160 characters by mapping 160 7-bit characters into 140 8-bit characters, you might find some characters won't make it through.

[slally]

FWIW, I think teleflip is recently no longer with us. Bummer.

Sean

[Baylink]

Well, I had heard that their base service was actually supposed to continue... but since I can't trace or telnet their mx server, you may be correct.

Darn. I guess I'll have to set one up.

[ab5602]

Yeah, the email gateways work, but they usually have message limits wrt/ how many messages can be sent from a source in a given time period. For very low volume messages however, these work good.