I know I can send an email to someone in the form of SMS, provided I know the SMS gateway details. Can the same thing be sent to a shortcode? Or do these services can handle the emails the same way SMS is handling?
I think it's not possible to send an email to a shortcode. Those are restricted to sending/receiving SMS only.
However, depending on the carrier, it is possible that they have installed an SMS-Email gateway, so the users can send/receive emails from their personal numbers. My carrier used to have that service some years ago. With that service I had an email address with the format number#carrierdomain.
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I put a lot of effort in perfectionizing my emails in Magento, in mail-tester i even have a 10. But stil the emails (also when i send a not transactional mail) go to spam in gmail and outlook.
Any idea why?
Email deliverability involves a lot of factors so more information is needed to help you. What are all the services you use to send email out other than Magento? Do you do email marketing? Do you get good engagement with your email marketing (opens. clicks) with low bounces? What's the nature of your business and the content you send in the Magento emails and other emails you send out (e.g., marketing emails) even if through other services?
What precisely is in your Sender Policy Framework Record (SPF) record (please post exactly what's in your SPF record for sending domain)? Do you have DKIM implemented with services that send mail on your behalf? Have you implemented DMARC?
Do you send email from a dedicated or shared IP address(s)? Check hosts and IP address for blacklists at mxtoolbox and check your senderscore at senderscore.org.
Do you know if the problem is limited to Magento or do other emails sent from that domain go to spam as well? You may want to set up a test account or two with gmail and outlook.com as it will be handy to have some email addresses to send to that you've never sent to before for testing purposes.
Note: I tried to post this as a comment but it was too many characters.
I want to use Twilio to create an SMS relaying service where the Twilio number is the only number that is exposed, much like web proxy servers that allow you to access the Internet anonymously. I've used the example php code that twilio provides, saved it to a php file and hosted it on a public web server, then updated the messages URL on the Twilio site accordingly. Any message sent to the Twilio number the is forwarded to my mobile. Everything works fine, except for the fact that when I reply to the forwarded message from my phone, the reply includes a header that says "Sent from your Twilio trial account - + mymobilenumber" I understand that the header is inserted because I have a trial account, however I don't want the mymobilenumber field to be exposed. Is it possible to hide this?
I should mention I'm not really a programmer but I'm learning with Twilio.
I followed the example given here:
https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/how-do-i-forward-my-sms-messages-to-another-phone-number
Thx
Antonio
A short code is a 5 or 6-digit number that can send and receive messages with mobile phones. These high-throughput numbers are perfect for apps that need to send messages to lots of users or need to send time sensitive messages. You can buy shortcodes from Twilio or port existing short codes to our platform.
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 hope this gets a response.
Say Person A sends an SMS to a shortcode in a certain syntax. How could a confirmation SMS be sent to Person A's mobile phone automatically ("Your message has been received successfully!"), after determining that the SMS received from Person A is in the correct syntax? I'm a total newbie when it comes to SMS - so if anyone could describe the entire end-to-end process/architecture that could make this happen, I'd be grateful!
You'd have to find a gateway provider who handles the receiving and the sending of messages for you using a defined API talking to a script/application in the language of your choice.
You usually receive messages on a number defined by the gateway provider. Incoming messages will trigger a call to a URL defined by you. Behind that URL will usually be a script that then performs the desired actions (e.g. parsing the message and sending an automated response SMS through the gateway provider.)
SO questions related to SMS Gateways:
Sending an SMS myself
SMS from web application
BulkSMS provides facilities for you to both send mobile terminating (MT) messages and handle receipt of mobile originating (MO) messages.
You can request a short code, which your users then send MOs to. The message can then be relayed, via a simple HTTP request, to your web server. You application then determines a suitable response and replies via SMS by calling the MT API of BulkSMS.
There may be restrictions and legislation applicable, depending on where you are, where your users are and the networks the messages are passing through. They can provide assistance here too.
International incoming numbers http://www.bulksms.com/int/w/solutions_incoming.htm
Receiving messages via HTTP http://www.bulksms.com/int/docs/eapi/reception/http_push/
Sending API http://www.bulksms.com/int/docs/eapi/
Short codes in South Africa http://bulksms.2way.co.za/w/solutions_psms.htm
Hope this helps
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).