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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - MMS & Advanced Issues ⬆ Archive through May 02, 2013 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| Shannon Rubin New member Username: Statistic Post Number: 1 Registered: 07-2011 |
I read through the documentation and I’m having some trouble figuring out exactly how to set this up and I need some support. Couple questions.. 1. If I needed to call support what are the hours over there? I’m Eastern Time, in the US. 2. Can I email my support scenario to someone? Basically we want two things. 1. All SMS/MMS messages that come in go to one mailbox in our Exchange environment. 2. Outgoing SMS/MMS messages should be able to go to any number of recipients, sometimes multiple recipients at once (copies) I see that the SMS gateway can be set up via DNS and MX records as an SMTP relay/mail exchanger. Our SMS server is anub.ibts.org Our Exchange 2007 domain is ibts.org I assume from the instructions that mms.ibts.org and sms.ibts.org will be the MMS and SMS email entries in the configuration. I would have to set up DNS and MX records for those so messages can be sent. I’m not getting how everything hooks together. If I send an MMS message to the phone number we have up on the SMS device, how do I address it such that it goes to NowSMS then gets routed to our Exchange server? Also, how do I send a mail from Exchange to the device and have it go to a particular cell phone? I don’t see any kind of configuration where I can say steve@sms.ibts.org = steve@ibts.org Thanks, | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 3331 Registered: 08-2008 |
Hi Shannon, Our office hours are UK hours, 9am to 5pm. Currently British Summer Time (GMT+1). 5 hours ahead of the US east coast, 8 hours ahead of the US west coast. 1 hour behind continental Europe. Most technical queries don't lend themselves well to telephone support as configurations can get quite complex. E-mail information (and telephone number) can be found at http://www.nowsms.com/techsupport/contact That said, we encourage support questions to take place on this discussion forum, as long as they don't involve confidential information (sometimes I'll ask for configuration files or logs to be emailed as a follow-up if they cannot be posted here). This approach benefits everyone as there is quite a bit of information that can be found by searching the thread here. With that intro, let's get to your questions. I am not an Exchange Server expert. I know a lot about how SMTP e-mail works, but not necessarily terminology and configurations that are specific to Exchange Server. To try to clarify your questions, I'm going to comment on various parts of what you posted above.
That is not the way our implementation works. NowSMS acts as an SMTP server. So it has its own e-mail domain(s). For example, you send to phonenumber@sms.ibts.org or username@sms.ibts.org if the message is to go out via SMS. Messages do not go into a mailbox on the Exchange Server, they are only relayed over SMTP. (If you want Exchange Server to accept/relay messages for NowSMS, then I believe this is called an "Accepted Domain" in Exchange Server terminology, with the type of domain being an "External Relay". This Exchange specific part of things is outside of my field of expertise.)
You can either address to multiple recipients by including each phone number as a separate e-mail address ... or you'd setup an e-mail address on your Exchange Server that forwards to multiple SMS e-mail addresses.
Yes.
Now you've lost me. Why would it get routed to NowSMS then to the Exchange Server if you are sending an MMS message to a phone number?
The phone number is part of the e-mail address. For example, phonenumber@sms.ibts.org. -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Shannon Rubin New member Username: Statistic Post Number: 2 Registered: 07-2011 |
If "The phone number is part of the e-mail address. For example, phonenumber@sms.ibts.org" This sounds like the easy part. Steve@ibts.org sends mail to phonenumber1@sms.ibts.org and it get routed to phone#1. How do sms messages take the reverse route. How would an sms message get sent to my exchange user? I think our assumption was that we would send a text message to the GSM modem we set up, and have that route as an email to our Exchange user. Then the exchange user could reply to that, and have a message sent back out to that phone. | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 3336 Registered: 08-2008 |
Ah ... now I understand your question. SMS has no concept of a conversation id, or any built-in feature that can correlate a reply with an original message. In other words there is no concept of a message thread. (When an SMS client shows a message thread, it simply shows all messages between that sender and receiver.) When NowSMS converts from e-mail to SMS, the sender address of the resulting SMS is the phone number of the GSM modem. If the SMS user replies, it is possible for NowSMS to remember which e-mail sender last sent to that phone number, and send a reply back to that sender. This works ok, unless more than one e-mail address sends to the same SMS phone number. In this case, NowSMS has no way to know which e-mail sender the reply is for, and if sender tracking support is enabled, it routes the reply to the e-mail address that most recently sent to that address. This is a difficult concept to explain, so I hope it makes sense. It is probably best explained with an example. user1@domain.com sends to 9999999999@sms.domain.com NowSMS sends an SMS to 9999999999, sender address of SMS becomes phone number of GSM modem. user2@domain.com sends to 9999999999@sms.domain.com NowSMS sends an SMS to 9999999999, sender address of SMS becomes phone number of GSM modem. SMS user at 9999999999 replies to message. NowSMS has no way of knowing which of these e-mail senders the reply is for. If e-mail sender tracking is enabled, NowSMS routes reply to the most recent e-mail sender, user2@domain.com. Note that by default, because of this limitation, we want to make sure that users understand it before enabling support for routing SMS replies back to e-mail. To enable support for routing the SMS replies back, it is necessary to manually edit the MMSC.INI file, and under the [MMSC] section header, add SMSEMailTrackSender=Yes If you have multiple GSM modems, it is also possible to configure NowSMS to use different modems to address this most recent sender issue. This is also probably best explained with an example. user1@domain.com sends to 9999999999@sms.domain.com NowSMS has not routed e-mail to SMS for 9999999999 before, and chooses to send an SMS out via GSM modem #1. Sender address of SMS becomes phone number of GSM modem #1. user2@domain.com sends to 9999999999@sms.domain.com NowSMS has previously routed e-mail to SMS for 9999999999 from user1@domain.com, so it chooses to send this SMS out via GSM modem #2. Sender address of SMS becomes phone number of GSM modem #2. SMS user at 9999999999 replies to the first message, and the reply is received on GSM modem #1. NowSMS knows that it most recently performed an SMS to e-mail conversion for user1@domain.com to 9999999999 using GSM modem #1, NowSMS routes reply to user1@domain.com. In this scenario, NowSMS will use as many different sending phone numbers (or modems) as your system supports. To define the SMS sender numbers to be used for e-mail to SMS, add SMSEMailSender= to the [MMSC] section of MMSC.INI. SMSEMailSender supports a comma delimited list of sender numbers ... such as +111111111,+222222222 ... and also supports ranges of sender numbers such as 800001-800100 to allocate a sequential range of short code numbers. Note ... this SMSEMailTrackSender support is new in recent versions of NowSMS. Make sure you have version 2011.05.23 or later (we just posted 2011.07.05 earlier this week) before attempting to use these settings. -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Shannon Rubin New member Username: Statistic Post Number: 3 Registered: 07-2011 |
Well I may have gotten lucky here then, because we only have one email address that will be sending sms messages via email. So if they all go back to that user, that will be perfect. We will use something simpler, like an exchange distribution list with multiple phone numbers@sms.ibts.org for sending out. So two new questions. 1. How do I enable "e-mail sender tracking" 2. We just purchased SMS from your guys but the version is 2010.11.04 how do I get the newer version? And can I just install it over the older one without losing our configuration? Thanks, | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 3339 Registered: 08-2008 |
In your case, it will be even simpler. You don't need to mess with the settings I described. A single 2-way command of mailto:user@domain.com will suffice. I will give more info tomorrow, I just wanted to give a quick info update now. The update can be installed easily without losing any configuration info. Just run the install from the new trial or from the update ZIP. | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 3341 Registered: 08-2008 |
Hi Shannon, This is a follow-up. Define a 2-way command with a command prefix of *, leave the receive phone number field blank, and define the command to execute as mailto:Steve@ibts.org The only tricky bit is that by default NowSMS will attempt to perform direct SMTP delivery to that mailbox. This may result in the e-mail getting stuck in a spam filter. If you configure an "SMTP Relay Host" on the "MMSC" page of the configuration dialog, any SMTP e-mail sending will be routed to this relay host for delivery. -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Shannon Rubin New member Username: Statistic Post Number: 4 Registered: 07-2011 |
I got it working. thanks for the help! I have a new question though. We also want to use this device to alarm us when there is some kind of service outage. We have a different server running OpManager. It's your basic Netcool clone. Back in the old days one would set up a modem physically attached to your monitoring server. If the network went down or email was down, the modem and pots line might still be up and working, and you could send a pager alert to notify. We're looking for similar functionality from this. OpManager has SMS capability. I would imagine this will only work if the modem is directly connected to the OpManager server? | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 3343 Registered: 08-2008 |
These types of monitoring programs frequently support an external command interface, and it's easy to create a command line script to send an SMS: http://www.nowsms.com/sending-sms-from-command-line Or if they support an HTTP trigger, you can configure a NowSMS URL that sends a message. I just took a quick look at OpManager documentation, and when they talk about SMS alerts, it is either a directly connected modem, or an email interface, so you should be ready to use the email interface. -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
