Are there any texting services out there (like Twilio) with APIs that allow you to see what message another message is in response to? For example: I want to tell whether message 3 is in response to 1 or 2.
A->B: Do you like ice cream?
A->B: Do you like pizza?
B->A: Yes.
I'm guessing that there's just no threadedness to text messages, and this is impossible. But might as well have a canonical answer out there.... Reasons for this belief:
When you send emails to a phone number at txt.att.net, it uses a different number each time.
The texting services that I've looked at don't offer the feature
The phone UIs I've used all present it as a flat message list rather than a threaded list
Can someone confirm this?
There is no native support for this type of functionality in SMS. Message threading for SMS is inferred on the client side from context. When I send a text to person 1, if I receive a reply from person 1 within a given time-frame, I can assume that it was part of the same "conversation". (I actually implemented something like this for a chat client that I was working on)
I have also seen where the original message is included with the response, and the client can group the messages accordingly (take a look at gmail), but this could be messy if your clients were not the same.
Just a few thoughts.
Related
This is more of a hypothetical question, so I can't really show any code examples. Imagine if a site like Twitter wanted to live-update stats on a Tweet via web sockets/Socket.io. In terms of performance, which of these would be the best approach?
Each action (like, retweet, reply) sends a message to the server, which then gets emitted to all clients, and the client is responsible for updating the appropriate tweet.
Each tweet the client loads is connected to a different room so that it only emits and receives messages relevant to itself.
Other?
Or perhaps it's dependent on the scale of the application? Maybe 1 is better if you had a Twitter clone with only a few users, whereas I would think 2 is better in Twitter's case because it's a matter of hundreds of "rooms" vs millions of signals/second? And if that's the case, at what point is one approach preferred over the other?
At scale, you do not want to be sending messages to clients that they did not ask for and do not have any use for. Imagine a twitter client that was receiving every single tweet being sent in real time. That could overwhelm that client and it would mean the server would be delivering every single tweet to every single connected client. That obviously doesn't scale on either the server side or the client side.
So option 1 is out.
The appropriate solution has the server send to the client only the messages that is has a particular interest in seeing. This works just fine at any scale. I can't tell whether your option 2 is that or not since rooms are just a tool for making groups of connections that you can send the same message to - they don't really decide who gets what message - that logic must be baked into your server code.
For a twitter-like service, it seems you're going to have to have a system where your server can easily tell which users have an interest in this particular new message. That can presumably be for a number of reasons such as they are following the author, they are following a hashtag present in the message, they are mentioned in the message, etc... That is server-side logic, not just simple rooms.
I use Twilio with my team management system. A text message is automatically sent out for each game. The receiver can then reply with YES or NO. My issue is that when I send two text messages, I have no way to tell if the reply is for the first message I sent, or the second.
Does Twilio have any way to determine which text message it was a response to?
Twilio developer evangelist here.
If you are sending two messages from one Twilio number to the same user number there is nothing within the SMS specification that allows a user to reply to a specific message, so there is nothing you can do with Twilio to detect that.
If you are sending two messages to two different numbers and you get replies from those numbers, you can match against the from number and see what the last message sent from that number was and attach the reply to that.
Alternatively, if you want to get replies from one user to different messages, you could send them from different Twilio numbers. That way you can match the outgoing number to the message and the answer. This is mostly used for phone number masking to enable anonymous communications and there is a good tutorial available on this in the Twilio documentation.
Let me know if that helps at all.
Our scenario is as follows:
We have a marketplace where sellers will receive multiple messages throughout the day from users.
We want to send message notifications etc via sms to sellers
We would like sellers to be able to reply to a sms message notification on their phone. We want what they text to appear as their reply on our site. Is this possible?
Say a seller checks their phone as sees that they have 5 notifications, is there a way they can reply to a specific message rather than the last one sent?
Any help would be much appreciated.
As you describe the use case, it is not possible. As you suspect, there's no way to link one inbound message to a particular outbound message. I'd suggest borrowing an idea from Twitter and including a Base-36 code in the notification. If a reply contains that code, then it's in response to that original message. For example...
Notitification: A seller is interested in your widget. LFLR
Reply: #LFLR Sorry. We are sold out of the widgets.
It will take a slight bit of effort from the sellers. But, then, they are motivated to sell. Using a Base-36 code will keep the number of characters to type under five even for a million plus messages.
I have noticed that certain SMS messages that I receive from companies come with a 'sender name'. eg. Just today I received an SMS from a number I have never used before (not im my contacts), however the senders name showed up as 'Adobe'. I get this from other companies too. eg Facebook, Google & Banking.
Is it similar to how a email server works? (you tell the server who you 'are' before you send the message) Is this the case with a carrier's cell tower?
I guess I'm wondering what the service is called and how it works? (ie. can you send 'header info' with SMS messages or is the cell tower just spoofing the message's 'sender number' and replacing it with characters?)
(hopefully this is the right place to ask this question...)
The MAP protocol (the one used for sending SMS messages among others) allow specifying either a phone number or an alphanumeric number as the sender.
AFAIK this cannot be set from your phone where the sender number will be always your public phone number but SMS Centers can allow sending such messages on other interfaces like the ones used by banks and the companies mentioned by you (usually using the SMPP or UCP protocoll).
Please note that some Telcos do not allow this kind of sender address in messages originated elsewhere but sent to their customers (or they don't allow it for everybody). They use SMS spam filters/firewalls called Home Routers for this.
Mobile communication in GSM, UMTS and LTE is governed by 3GPP.
The TP-OA field in SMS-DELIVER TPDU in an incoming SMS typically contains the number of a sender.
The network fills the TP-OA field with usually an MSISDN.
Please see 3GPP TS 23.040 Figure C.10.
But in case of a company name, TP-OA can be made alphanumeric using the Type of Number Information Element as 7-bit default alphabet
I suggest you to read 3GPP TS 24.011 and 23.040 to get an idea of how SMSes work.
However, I must point out that since a sender does not send TP-OA, it can't be easily spoofed.
I have a system where SMS are sent to an email address which is sent to a script for processing. The query in these emails is very simple (something like a zip code).
How do I deal with the multitude of different ways that an email can come in? I had a request from an iPhone, which came in as a mms. The email was a multipart message which contained another multipart message.
When I send from my paltry cell phone, I just get a simple text string.
What's a good way to get the intended query out of these emails, regardless of how it is sent.
There is a finite number of ways the e-mail can be represented, I'd say do some empirical testing (as you have, already) and prepare for everything you find. Figure out a way to classify the current case and select the appropriate strategy for extracting the content you're interested in.