sending sms via filemaker application

[Deepak Kumar]

how can i send a sms to a mobile number via fm application.?

[bcooney]

See: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/email-to-sms/

[Vaughan]

That's a good resource Barbara but it requires knowing the mobile carrier. I dunno about the US but here is Australia there is no way of determining the carrier from the number.

I have used commercial sms gateways to send sms from FMP. Here in Australia each sms costs around 6 cents to send. Sending the sms differs by gateway provider: one I've worked with was very simple where the sms message is the body of the e-mail and the phone number is the first part of the e-mail address eg, [email protected]. Another gateway provider required all the information to be in the body of the e-mail message in a particular return-delimited format which also included the gateway account name and password, which was a lot more work.

Either way, the sms is sent as an e-mail from FMP. Remember that sms are plain text only and limited to 160 characters in length. Interestingly, the way that sms messages over 160 are handled varies by carrier: some carriers simply truncate the message while others split the message into multiple messages (and charge for the number of sms messages actually sent). So you may want to validate the messages to ensure their length is correct.

[Vaughan]

A follow-up to the sending of sms:

I've got one client that has had an enormous amount of problems with the sending of the e-mails through FileMaker. After some 6 months of head scratching it turned out that their internet service provider has a 25 email per hour send limit. They didn't encounter the restriction normally because they use Zimbra for their office e-mail, which is web-based, so it never goes through the ISP's smtp server. So they could see their office mail working while the mail from FMP was not, and they were convinced that there was no problem at their end.

My recommended solution is for them to set up their own smtp server to handle outgoing mail themselves and thus avoid the restriction.

So if you encounter 1506 errors from Send Mail step, don't immediately assume it's a problem with FileMaker or the database programming and refuse to pay your invoices until it's fixed even though the developer has already fixed it three times, got a second developer in to check the code but found nothing that could cause the problem, and is telling you it must be a problem at your end and has to spend a day in your office proving to you that it is so you will pay the invoices for work started almost a year ago, and it was only a small job. ;)

[bcooney]

:therethere:

[Vaughan]

LOL thanks Barbs. ;)