On Mon, 17 Jan 2022, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > Every cell phone provider, or at least just about every US cell phone > provider, has an email to SMS gateway. It's free for someone sending > email to it, not necessarily for the recipient. The problem is you have > to know the provider for a given number, and AFAIK, there's no > particularly easy way to do that automatically and scriptably (so you > can generate an email address for the correct gateway). MMS gateways > also exist, although the acceptable MIME types and size/complexity > limits for attachments may be tedious to discover.
I've seen a reference to his before; the receiver pays to receive mobile calls in the USA? In Australia it's the sender who pays (of course). And I believe that mobile phones (what you call cellular phones) don't have their own prefix? We reserve "04" for that; at one time you could even tell which provider it was, but now you get to keep your number when you change providers. But to bring this back on topic... > Alternatives: a service (some free for small volumes only) that can send > SMS from a computer. Or Asterisk plus extensions, to set yourself up a > full VoIP PBX...except that will need some paid service too, to connect > to. But it will do a lot more than just send (or receive) SMS, it could > forward phone calls, with proper hardware interfaces drive either old > fashioned or VoiP phones, etc. It looks like a lot of work and learning > as well as expense, though, and really ought to have a dedicated server, > too, although that's not absolutely necessary. We had that in a previous $JOB; if Nagios (a general system monitor) detected something that triggered a rule then a set of users would receive a brief SMS, sent from a GSM modem. I looked at this for my own LAN, but it ain't cheap... -- Dave
