I worked with SMS (outgoing and incoming) a few years ago. 3 cents is, believe it or not, the ballpark going rate (it was 5-10 cents then). You can negotiate a bulk deal with various SMS gateways if you're big, but it's never going to be as cheap as email. The silver lining is that it prevents SMS spam, since it costs too much to do it.
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 8:26 AM, GAEfan <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks, guys. 3 cents per message does not sound like much, but it is > not scalable. > > I set this up sending SMS via email. A couple of warnings for > everyone: > > 1) AT&T does not auto-truncate the message to 160 characters, so you > must write a script to do that. If you don't, AT&T breaks it up into > multiple messages, and the receiver will get billed for 20 cents per > each 160 chars. > 2) When sending via email, EVERYTHING counts in the 160 characters: > your FROM address (HINT: get a new admin address with a single > letter), the recipients address (22 chars right there), SUBJECT, BODY, > and the header labels (FRM:, SUBJ:, MSG:), plus another 8 or 9 > characters (maybe the date or the fake number GAE sends from). So, > you end up with A LOT less than 160 chars to send in the body. > > Here is my script: > > chars_available = 160 - 39 - len(subject) - len(to) # the 39 is for > the length of the sender address, header labels, etc. > if chars_available < 0: > chars_available = 0 > message = mail.EmailMessage( > sender = "[email protected]", # shorten your from address. This > requires a new GAE admin acccount > subject = subject, > body = body[:chars_available], > to = to > ) > > Would love to see a true SMS feature in GAE! > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<google-appengine%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > -- Ikai Lan Developer Relations, Google App Engine Twitter: http://twitter.com/ikai Delicious: http://delicious.com/ikailan ---------------- Google App Engine links: Blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
