SMS gateways

DevilWAH

Hi,

Does any one in the UK uses a sms gateway, (email or web to SMS)

I have seen a few on the web by searching, but as we would use it to send authentication details to users I want to make sure it is a reputable service who don't harvest data for marketing etc..


The other option would be to build a SMS gateway, but not sure if this is a cost effect way to go, and what hard ware we would need. It would be nice if we could use a BT landline to send generated text over, but dont know if this is possible.

Cheers

NovaHax

I don't have any recommendations, but just out of curiosity...is email or mail to SMS actually common place in your environment. The only thing I can think of is some alerting tools that output SMS... What is driving your requirement for an SMS gateway?

DevilWAH

Two factor authentication is one big one.

Ie person goes to sign in to VPN, system sends them a text with a one time password, that they can use if they require access to more sensitive areas. Could use email but this means they get the email in the same device they sign on to the VPN with, we rather keep it completely separate.

alerts are also another, but not just It monitoring. We run high bio-security labs, if the systems go down or an alarm is raised we need to be able to alert people even if the external network is down.

Lastly for marketing, we want to offer a service where visiting scientists (we have lots from countries all round the world), can sign up to either email or SMS alerts for information on talks and conferences we have. I would agree that email is the favoured option, but when travailing lots turn of there data plans due to cost, so are more easy to reach via text.

The Technomancer

Most cell providers offer an email address that forwards to SMS.

For example, if I want to send someone a text from email, I have their 10 digit phone number as 555-123-4567, and know their service provider is AT&T, I can send an email to 5551234567@txt.att.com and they'll receive the message as a text.

It is pretty messy, however, as the headers show up as part of the message. For internal alerts and such, that's cool, but if you're offering a professional SMS service, you'll want an SMS gateway to make the texts look cleaner.

the_Grinch

When I was working at the university we were looking into a system for emergency notifications. I ran across this during that search:

Twilio Cloud Communications - APIs for Voice, VoIP and Text Messaging

Dunno if that will help.

pram

I'd use Amazon SNS since you will be subscribing people, the python API (boto) is incredibly easy to use. It's pretty cheap, I personally use it for Nagios alerts. SNS covers email and sms.

DevilWAH

Hi,

sorry it not something you would subscribe people to. Check point uses the format

http://smsgateway.com/smsget.php?number=$PHONE&message=$MESSAGE

to send its one time passwords. So it has to be able to pass the number to deliver to and the message. One thing I want to get away from is having having script running, I would like a native SMS gateway that can handle this formate.