SMS messaging API

[Rick Weiser]

Hi all,

I have a customer who needs the ability to send texts from within their Pick Application.  So, I am looking for an SMS API that I can call to do this.

Has anyone accomplished this and what have you used to do so?

Thanks,

Rick

[Kevin King]

Rick there some services that do this or you can alternatively email certain gateways to email their subscribers. I have a list of these email addresses if you're interested.

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[Glen Batchelor]

 Look at Twilio. I used their interfaces to create SMS and DTMF interactivity with our distribution software on D3/Linux.

[Scott Ballinger]

I'm with Kevin on this. Just send an email to the phone number; the only problem is you need to know the recipient's carrier. In my case I always know to whom I'm sending the texts, so I have asked them who their carrier is. I guess the worst case scenario would be to blast them all...

AT&T: num...@txt.att.net.
T-Mobile: num...@tmomail.net
Verizon: num...@vtext.com (text-only), number@vzwpix (text + photo)
Sprint: num...@messaging.sprintpcs.com or num...@pm.sprint.com.
Virgin Mobile: num...@vmobl.com.

BTW I use postie to send emails (http://www.infradig.com/postie.html) which costs $35 and works great.

/Scott Ballinger

Pareto Corporation

Edmonds WA USA

206 713 6006

[George Gallen]

I'm finding that if you include a url in the text, most carriers hit the url for a preview. This was a problem on my end as I was including a unique url to click to stop future texts. I would send the email/text out, and almost immediately it was being registered as clicked. Very frustrating, I couldn't figure any way to differentiate the preview rule access vs clicking on the link directly. I tried looking at the agent string but there wasn't anything that jumped out, no bot reference.

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[Tony Gravagno]

I Agree with Glen: use Twilio. The email method is dated and can't be trusted.
I built a platform with D3+Twilio for bi-directional SMS and inbound/outbound phone calls. It can serve as a call center router, reminder service, management notifications, bi-directional application event status updates, or order placement and inquiry via voice and DTMF. As documented in my blog it was originally created simply to get notifications from the DBMS and then later to control the DBMS.
I just updated the blog software and Search and other things aren't working yet. But for now most phone-related articles can be found with this:
http://nebula-rnd.com/blog/tag/telephony
You won't find a how-to there on integrating with Twilio. They provide a wealth of examples and connectivity libraries for doing this. Tip: USE cURL!  My articles are about concepts related to using SMS that some people don't generally consider.

If anyone is interested in purchasing components of this, I was planning to productize some or all of this within the coming year.

HTH

[KOSDAY SOLUTIONS]

Hi Rick:

I use same solution as Tony. We work with bulksms+curl. We have one file named SMS with a Trigger where we launch this sentence:

 curl --silent "http://bulksms.com.es:5567/eapi/submission/send_sms/2/2.0?username=xxx&password=xxxx&sender=xxxx&message=My text message&msisdn=phone number&allow_concat_text_sms=1"

Sometime we add "test_always_succeed=1" to simulate sending.

We have this solution two years ago, sending near of 100 messages per day.  

Best Regards

Pedro

[Rick Weiser]

Thanks everyone for your responses.  I think Twilio is the way to go.

[Bill Crowell]

I've written an API for Cdyne's SMS-Notify product. It's a web service on their end. It works quite well. You can also receive text messages into the application. You get a virtual phone number that is their system.

[Rick Weiser]

Hi All,

I am looking at this again.  I have been using the SMTP method of sending texts via carrier email.  It works fine until at least one of the carriers (t-mobile) stopped allowing this type of send and the texts have max character limits.

Is there anything new that you are using that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get going?

Thanks,

Rick

[Tony Gravagno]

Hey Rick - I can't resist an "I told ya so". If you are just concerned about cost but you still want to use an API for SMS through a transaction broker, Google for "twilio competition".

But solution providers and businesses need to evolve with the times. We can't look forward to technology of the prior decade. That's what kills a lot of MV developers.

I've been working on multi-channel messaging that delivers messages to consumers in whatever medium they prefer. Example of channels include Twitter, SMS, Slack, Skype, Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Email. We can also send messages to IFTTT and Zapier, which themselves support a huge number of channels and applications. By supporting channels like this we don't need to tell people how they're going to get our messages anymore. We offer notifications and let the consumer decide when and how to get them.

This should be considered an AD because I would welcome sponsorship for efforts on this project, projects with clients for similar integrations, and partnership for the resulting offerings.

One "simple" (not really but sorta...) way to support messaging is to create a cross-platform mobile app with Xamarin that does nothing but open a notification for messages queued on a server. It's completely free, there are no limits. Your audience is limited to Android and iOS users.

That gets you about 97% of the market that has a device, and that includes Wi-Fi-only devices that you didn't reach with SMS. For the other 3% on "dumb" devices you can still send SMS or email and it won't cost you nearly as much as what you've been concerned about spending. Obviously you have already written off those who do not have a device/service for SMS. Whether you write off that other 3% depends on the business model.

HTH

T