Hi,
I've been using mailman to send routine announcements for a long time and more and more what people want is a text message. I've been able to discover gateways for individual carriers so that I can send to <number>@<gateway>.<carrier>.com and the subscriber gets a text, so phone notification which is quick and handy. This has been well received.
I've been looking at the list of carriers getting longer and have looked into email to sms services but what I've seen has been commercial and too expensive.
Is there a collaborative or open source email to sms project? Can anyone refer me to better information? I've been pretty much just casting around so far.
TIA.
Dave
-- In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions.
----- Ursula Le Guin
On 02/27/2019 02:22 PM, Dave Stevens wrote:
Hi,
Hi Dave,
I've been using mailman to send routine announcements for a long time and more and more what people want is a text message. I've been able to discover gateways for individual carriers so that I can send to <number>@<gateway>.<carrier>.com and the subscriber gets a text, so phone notification which is quick and handy. This has been well received.
I've been looking at the list of carriers getting longer and have looked into email to sms services but what I've seen has been commercial and too expensive.
Is there a collaborative or open source email to sms project? Can anyone refer me to better information? I've been pretty much just casting around so far.
I don't think I've seen a collaborative or open source email to SMS project. I suspect this is because of the technical nature of gatewaying and / or the cost associated with doing so, be it infrastructure or per message.
The only free services that I've seen have been operated by the cellular networks for their customers.
The other commercial services have all had cell phones (or other similar devices that interface with the cellular network like a phone) and end up sending lots of texts.
I don't see how to overcome either of these limitations. Maybe there is a way.
I feel like sending text message is beyond the scope of what a mailing list manager should do. If some of the subscribed addresses happen to be email address that are subsequently gatewayed, so be it.
If you really want to look into something to send SMS (or MMS) messages in bulk, I'd look at something in parallel with Mailman. Let Mailman do what it's good at, email, and use something else for SMS (MMS).
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
In article 5a065a2d-14cb-3f60-7175-0f2b81ed47eb@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net you write:
The only free services that I've seen have been operated by the cellular networks for their customers.
Agreed. They are heavily rate limited to deter spam so they're not great for mailing lists.
I don't see how to overcome either of these limitations. Maybe there is a way.
If you actually want to send SMS, you need to pay for it through one of the many SMS API services. It costs on the order of 0.7c/message to US numbers which seems pretty cheap to me, but I suppose that depends how valuable you think your lists are.
Trying to integrate directly with mailman would be a nightmare, but you could easily set up a kludge where people subscribed separately to the SMS forwarder, subscribe a special local forwarder address to the mailman list, and then tie a script to that address that takes the contents of the messages and passes it to the SMS API. (Stripping out all the extra cruft, of course.)
-- Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
On 2/27/2019 3:22 PM, Dave Stevens wrote:
Is there a collaborative or open source email to sms project? Can anyone refer me to better information? I've been pretty much just casting around so far.
Google for nagios sms notifications. As I recall something was doable with a basic dialler program and a modem back when, now you can get a GSM modem and send actual sms'es.
Off the top of my head you'd put this behind a script-mailbox and subscribe it to your list and Robert's your parent's sibling.
Dima
participants (4)
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Dave Stevens -
Dmitri Maziuk -
Grant Taylor -
John Levine