Sending SMS text messages via e-mail

Title	Sending SMS text messages via e-mail
Weblog	Gurteen Knowledge Weblog
Posted Date	Monday 20 May 2002 20:34 GDT
Posted By	David Gurteen
Links	http://www.textforce.com/textforce/
Categories	Information Technology
Technorati Tags	information technology
del.icio.us Tags	information_technology

Well I was sitting down with my friend Ian Garman this evening helping him to put together a proposal for a client. In it he wanted to send an 'alert' to a mobile phone when an action was overdue in a Notes database.

Simple I said if we can find a service that allows us to send SMS messages via e-mail. Within less than a minute I had found such a service from TextForce. After he left, I registered and sent my first message. It must have taken no more than 15 minutes. Here is the e-mail - the format is in XML.

From: tom.jones@gurteen.com
To: email2sms@textforce.net
Subject: email2sms

<SMSMESSAGE>
<USERNAME>David Gurteen</USERNAME>
<PASSWORD>20TGHUDA</PASSWORD>
<ORIGINATOR>Gurteen</ORIGINATOR>
<MESSAGE>Hello Iggy ... this is a test message via e-mail, and you are not even home yet! Cool! David Gurteen.</MESSAGE>
<NUMBERLIST>447976704756,447774178650</NUMBERLIST>
</SMSMESSAGE>

Now what seems a little more difficult is to send e-mail messages that contain forms encoded in XML from a Palm Pilot to Lotus Notes and have Notes convert them into Notes documents and take action on them - such as sending an SMS alert message. The Notes end is easy as I have figured out how to parse XML - what is needed is a cute Palm Pilot application that will send the forms - so back to Google.

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