sms gateway - General advice about possibilities - sms

I have very limited knowledge about sms gateways, so please bear with me.
I'am running a medical practice, and i'am building a wordpress website, so patients can book appointments online, and i would like that they receive a sms confirmation when it is done ( i'am using bookly plugin). My idea is when a new booking is made, with Zapier, i can trigger an sms.
I already have a subscription for a sms gateway with the compagny that provides me with the patient management system in the office. Thus i have ( servername, login, password, and the receiving adresse ) for the sms gateway.
how can use these information to achieve what i want. I tried to search around, but i am only finding compagnies with their own servers, so i need to make a new subscription, which i am not interessted in. And the compagny i have subscription at, wont help me with support for the website.
Is there a service, that provides a sms gateway, where I can use "my own" server ?
I hope that make sense, thanks.

Related

Sending/Receiving multi-recipient SMS - Twilio API

I am writing an app that will facilitate the sending and receiving of SMS messages via a web application. I would like to allow for multiple recipients (not bulk, just a few recipients at most).
I understand that in order to send to multiple recipients, I have to make multiple API calls, and that is fine. The problem I am having is receiving text messages via the Webhook callback. If the SMS was sent to multiple recipients, I cannot see the other recipients in the callback, just myself as the recipient.
Because of this, I have no idea whether this message was intended for just me, or for other recipients as well. This is a problem, because I would like to show threaded conversations similar to Google hangouts, or the SMS applications on all Andorid and iPhones.
I cannot figure out a way to track conversations, if I can't tell if a received message was sent to just me, or a group of recipients. Any suggestions? I do not yes use Twilio on a production server, so if this is not possible to do using Twilio, but is possible using another service, that would be an option for me as well.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
Twilio doesn't fully support group messaging the way that you are used to it when using a phone. That actually relies on MMS under the hood to keep the members of the group chat synced up.
Where you make multiple API calls to send messages to each user, that is manifested as just a single message with no group attached. Thus, any reply to that message comes solely from that person you sent the message to. There is no group at all at this point.
The link that Alex shared in the comments is the closest way you can get group messaging to work. It relies on everyone messaging one Twilio number and the application behind it fanning the messages out to all the recipients. The blog post also comes with some handy subscribe/unsubscribe administration for the group.

Automated/Bot message posting to Microsoft-Teams chat room

How can I automatically post messages to chat rooms in Microsoft-Teams? This is for one-way messaging: i.e. posting messages, not reading messages.
The big picture here is we are evaluating different Group Chat solutions, and one requirement is to post error messages to chat rooms from various services & programs.
A sensible approach seems to be to build a Bot using the REST API however just the authentication seems crazy complex, even then I can't work out how to just post a message. We're looking for a general solution that can be used simply in different scripting languages (Perl, Python, shell scripts, etc), so we don't want to use the .NET SDK or Node.js SDK.
We've already looked at Slack and Cisco Spark. Posting messages in both of these is super simple, so I'm hoping there's a similarly simple solution for Microsoft-Teams?!
For example:
In Slack you can use incoming webhooks to post messages. You use the web interface to get a unique webhook URL for each chat room, and then do simple HTTP POST to that URL (with a JSON message payload) to post to that chat room as the Bot. I had it working in 10 minutes.
In Cisco Spark you create a Bot which gives you a unique Access Token. You then get a room_id for the chat room and use those together to do an HTTP POST (again with a JSON payload) to create a message in the chat room.
So how do you programmatically post/create/send messages to a chat room in Microsoft-Teams?
The simplest way to do what you want is to post a message to a channel using an "Incoming Webhook" connector. For more information, see here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/connectors?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#setting-up-a-custom-incoming-webhook
What you're describing is precisely how the Office 365 Connectors work. A Connector allows you to post messages into a Group or Team using web-hooks and a simple JSON payload.
There is a playground for playing with these that is super helpful. One note however, there is a bug in the playground's webhook implementation, so for testing purposes, I would stick to the Send via Email option. This doesn't affect how these work in production, the bug is isolated to the Playground app itself.

Magento Newsletters take over 24 hours to send

I have a little under 7000 newsletter subscribers. I run an online shop and would like to send out daily newsletters for my Deal Of The Day. This is currently impossible as it takes at least an entire day for my newsletter to get to all of its subscribers. Please advise
Please use some email marketing solution to send emails.
Choose from list below:
1. Mailchimp (easiest of all)
2. Netcore (provides full solution)
3. Icubes
4. Sendy.co (cheapest of all)
Using these you will also be able to track your email response like opens, clicks etc.
You can hack Magento to send more emails; however, your web hosting provider will probably pull your plug unless they specifically allow mass Commercial Email.
You will be black listed as a spammer if you don't understand how to set up domain keys, SPF and a series of other items. One of the biggies is that you shouldn't be using port 25 unencrypted traffic without authentication. Any bypassing of this changes your bulk email output to UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) in their books. The other biggie is not having an unsubscribe method present in every email sent.
If you have the technical capacity to be running your own web server (not have to use a hosting provider) then Amazon's SMS is probably a good choice if you have Ashley Shroeder's SMTP module installed.
If you don't have the technical capability, then using an ESP (eMail Service Provider) like MailChimp is a far better way. They take care of a lot of the technical detail with bounces, email list management, unsubscribe, etc. to help prevent you from being blacklisted as a UCE source.

mailchimp integration in magento

Now am heard about mailchimp for effective email marketting
So i downloaded it form here
But i have few questions
whta is the advantage of mailchimp ?
Better tutorial for mailchimp ?
Better tutorial for mailchimp ?
Anybody please help me
I want to integrate mailchimp in magento
any help is appreciated
The advantages...
Using the Magento newsletter function will probably get you banned from sending email from your web server. Most hosting plans put a limit on the amount of transactional emails that can be sent for the following reason. If they end up sending too much spam-like email, they will be put on block lists and then all their customers get penalized for a few bad players.
They would rather that you send promotional email which can bounce, or end up being marked as unsolicited commercial email through an email service provider that monitors and cleans up any activities that cause unnecessary junk mail to enter the system and also limits through TOS, where lists can come from (existing customers, people who've subscribed, people who wish to receive promotional email and have signed up through other means).
Mail Chimp is one such email service provider, there are several, a couple have created integration modules for Magento so you don't have to export your newsletter subscribers and import them into the email service.
Mail Chimp also is able to give you statistics and will tie into Google Analytics so you can start tracking how effective your promotional emails are, can try different approaches and see what really works and what customers were interested in on the promotional email through link referral from each item you've included. With Magento, you sling stuff at a wall and hope something sticks, with the statistics Mail Chimp can tell you what you flung at the wall, how hard you flung it, how sticky it was and whether people prefer popsicles and chocolate truffles over candy apples and lemon drops. From this you can go from "Meh, whatever..." responses to "Hmm, I think I want this".
Any email service provider you choose can offer this type of statistics and analysis... Magento Newsletter can't.
This is copy/pasted straight out of a proposal I recently submitted for a Magento site with integration with a 3rd party newsletter system (in this case I am using the Fontis Campaign Monitor module, which I like);
"
The default Magento email newsletter functionality is not as good as it could be. I would normally hook the email newsletter submission box up to a service like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor (I'd recommend the latter).
They allow you to manage your distribution lists and generate and customise email templates yourself which will actually arrive at the inboxes of your customers and not get spammed, bounced or look awful in their email client. These systems allow you to test your newsletter in a huge range of email clients and will advise you of any mistakes you've made (ie badly chosen spammable keywords).
They will allow you to send the comapigns to your distribution lists from thier server, and will also give statistics on your email campaigns – bounce rate, open rate, click through rate, numbers flagged as spam, users who unsubscribed, all the different geographies they went to etc.
And they are free until you get about 2000 recipients, after which you pay a small amount for a very good service.
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You can find examples and demos in Third-Party API Wrappers for PHP repositories.

EMAIL via SMS ( and not the other way around, which is quite common)

I want to know is there any technology which allows you to set up an sms gateway, via which users can send emails?
Take a look at Twilio or Tropo - these provide SMS gateways which allow you to respond to incoming SMS in whatever way you like.

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