I already have a SIM card with a company that allows tethering and A2P.
I want to be able to send an SMS with a unique sender ID (company name) using that sim card.
Is this possible and if so, what should I purchase and how do I set it up?
It is NOT possible to alter the senderid when sending SMS using a SIM card + modem. The senderid will simply be the number belonging to that SIM.
If you want to have a custom (alpha) senderid, your only option is using a professional A2P SMS gateway. But even then it is not always possible, as not all countries allow alpha senderids. They might get overwritten to a short/longcode, or the operators require senderid whitelisting (basically, you need to request "access" to an alpha senderid, by sending your personal/company details and SMS content details to the operators. This is done to battle SPAM messages)
Yes this is possible.
Most of the time you don't need any SIM card as you'll be using some sort of API, most of the time a HTTPS/JSON or HTTPS/XML API. If you intend to use a SIM to send SMSes, having a dedicated sender ID will be most probably impossible: using a SIM will make your request arrive through the "regular" signaling link just as "any subscriber" that sends an SMS from his mobile, while using an API will make you use the SMPP links to the SMS-C where specific configuration can be done on per client basis. If I misunderstood something, please sent a comment.
Anyway, you have to have an agreement with your SMS API provider or telco to use a dedicated ID
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In a perfect world, the solution I'm looking for would be an api resource tied to my physical phone, e.g. I could POST an sms message to https://url.com/api/sms, and this api would have the end result of sending an sms from my physical phone. This means that the sms conversation would appear natively in my phone; if the recipient replies to the sms, it would appear just as a normal conversation as if I had physically typed the original sms via my phone.
I understand that I could set the replyto/callback/caller-id via Twilio's api. This would mean that the sms gets sent out by the api, and if the recipient replies to it, I could have the reply forwarded to my phone. But what would be missing in this scenario is the original message sent via the api, that the recipient is replying to.
Is there a streamlined way to achieve this, perhaps with Zapier?
One arduous solution I have in mind is to write an on-phone-app to intermediate the sms transmission so that I essentially have an sms-controlled api on the physical phone vs. a traditional http api. (On android, the api would "listen" via DATA_SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION and then send via sendTextMessage). But this seems cumbersome and would also require updating the app code when/if android changes the underlying SmsManager library. The advantage of this is that I could avoid Twilio altogether, by using my service provider's email-to-sms to send to the on-phone-makeshift-sms-api.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
I think you are looking for a feature that we just announced in preview. This is known as Hosted SMS and allows you to add SMS powered by Twilio to your existing phone number.
You need to apply to get access to Hosted SMS as it is newly in testing. You can do so with the form here: https://www.twilio.com/sms/hosted
I've set up texting to a physical phone by using Twilio's SIM cards and associating it to a phone number.
We have application that automatically sends message through a broadband stick then We want to buy a sim or any other way (LEGALLY) that make our Sender number will be a Company name
0999xxxxxx7 into CompanyName
please give me suggestion
(Philippines)
You can use a service like http://www.clickatell.com/ and specify the sender ID when sending messages through their API. However, the sender ID capability is not supported everywhere and you might have to get multiple numbers from then to support different locations.
I've read auto sms is not possible, if you send a SMS through an app you need user interaction like pressing a button.
But if my phone shows up at a particular position based on gps and a stored record that has that gps info, would that not be the user interaction I need and the sms just get sent?
From the code I've seen if button pressed run this code and send SMS.
What I'd be doing basically is
If I arrive at this location send SMS. From my view this is not exactly Auto SMS, its sms based on certain variables but without user interaction.
Is this possible, am I making any sense lol
As a workaround, you could use one of the SMS services available to send a SMS. If you would like a free solution, you can use the carrier email-sms to send a SMS. You just have to send an email at this point in your code.
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.
I'm trying to figure out how to set up an SMS service where users can communicate with people on phones that are not participating in my service. "TextFree" on iPhone does something like what I want to do. They let you sign up, then you can send messages for "free" to other friends that aren't part of the service.
It looks like when you sign up for TextFree, they assign you an email address [user#textfree.us]. People outside the service without MMS capabilities can't send an SMS to this user. The user must first send an SMS to them, starting a conversation. I think this is what they're doing:
Textfree signs up for an account with a bulk SMS provider, and is assigned a single phone #, like "123".
Joe signs up for TextFree, gets assigned email: joe#textfree.us.
Mary wants to send Joe an sms, but can't because she doesn't know what # to direct the sms to.
Joe sends an sms to Mary using textfree. This really just makes an http request to some textfree server. The server gets the request, and the destination # (Mary's phone).
The server sends the sms out using their bulk sms api provider.
Mary receives the sms, and sees the originator phone # as "123".
Mary replies to the sms, using this phone #, "123".
Their sms provider receives the message, and forwards it to textfree's http server.
Textfree now has to resolve that the sms received by Mary's phone # is destined for Joe (not sure how this can be done), so it can be delivered to Joe's account.
I think that all makes sense and seems feasible, I'm just not sure about that last step, how they could figure out which conversation sms' belong to. If all outside users are directing their sms to phone #123, how could I figure out which internal user the message is destined for? Is there some way to embed a unique identifier in an SMS, so that when the external user replies to the SMS, some unique ID can be embedded in there to provide that type of context to read on the reply side of things?
Long question, thanks for any thoughts!
As for the last part of your question (unique ID in SMS):
I know of no mechanism that could help you here. When replying to a short message phones only set the sender address as destination and the user is free to type the text. The headers in a short message PDU are solely for the basic transport parameters (encoding, sender-ID, ...). There is a way to define so called user data headers, but for this to be of any use for you, you'd have to be in control of most of the devices that are involved in the message delivery, including the handsets... So basically the only way I see to correlate messages with each other reliably is the use of some ID within the message text.
An alternate approach would be to rent a bunch of numbers and assign these permanently (I assume some subscription model here) to your users. This way you could use these as identification numbers within your service and forward the messages to their real phone numbers (or even a completely different media like email / instant messenger).