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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through October 16, 2008 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| levi mercadal New member Username: Levimerc Post Number: 1 Registered: 07-2008 |
Hello, I have downloaded and installed the trial version of the Nowsms/mms gateway and currently testing it. I'm very much interested in this program specially the email-to-sms feature. But, there is one thing that is puzzling me: I can send a test message from the web menu interface. But how do i send a message from a mobile phone which is an internet capable such like a vodafone in japan? Or how do a smsc user send an email message using another email client which is using a remote laptop or computer? Thank you for your help. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 7637 Registered: 10-2002 |
Unless you're really familiar with the intracies of configuring e-mail systems this is tough. There's a pretty decent explanation in the documentation, but it's a bit overwhelming. In short, there are two different approaches. 1.) Do you want a large number of people (for example, all users in one or more domains) to be able to route e-mail to SMS via this gateway without provisioning each sender? If that is what you want to achieve, then your NowSMS needs to look like an SMTP mail server to the outside world (or it needs to have another existing SMTP mail server configured to forward/relay mail to NowSMS as a mail server). This requires that you establish an MX record (Mail eXchange) in internet DNS, as this is how other e-mail servers find your mail server in order to route e-mail to it. When using NowSMS in this way, you can limit who is allowed to send through the gateway using the "Authorised E-Mail to SMS/MMS Senders" setting on the "MMSC" page of the configuration dialog. 2.) Do you want a limited number of people for whom you wish to make this capability available, with explicit provisioning of each enabled user. If this is what you want to achieve, it is easiest to setup NowSMS to look like a POP3/SMTP server to the e-mail client. The e-mail client sees the NowSMS server as just another mail server. Provision each sending user with an "SMS Users" account on the NowSMS server, and check "Enable POP3 Server" on the "MMSC" configuration page. Configure your e-mail client to login to the NowSMS server using the "SMS Users" account name and password. It is also necessary to configure the e-mail client to authenticate for sending as well as receiving e-mail. (This additional authentication is quite standard these days, but the exact terminology varies between e-mail clients.) In this case, to send a message to an SMS user, the e-mail client will usually be able to simply address the message to a phone number. However, some e-mail clients may object that the recipient needs to include an "@" sign, otherwise it is not a valid e-mail address. In that case, you send it to phonenumber@domain, where "domain" is defined in the "Domain Name for SMS E-Mail" setting on the "MMSC" page of the configuration dialog.
This is where e-mail to SMS is more complicated than it should be. The SMS sender needs to include the recipient e-mail address in the text of the message. So for example, they'd send the following text: nowsms@now.co.uk This is a test message To enable this, you need to define a "2-way" command in NowSMS, where the content of the SMS message is sent via e-mail. Basically you can configure an SMS command prefix of "*" or "*@*" (the latter indicates that the command prefix is a match only if the first "word" of the SMS message contains an "@" symbol), and then a command of mailto:@@SMSPREFIX@@. This command will cause the SMS message to be forwarded to the e-mail address that appears as the first word of text in the message. If you use a command prefix of "*", and the SMS sender does not include an "@" in the recipient address, then NowSMS will automatically generate a reply back to the sender with the following text: Invalid e-mail recipient. Please specify a valid e-mail address to start the text of your message. If you want to have some other handling (such as a default domain name) for routing SMS to e-mail, see the following post: http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/11347.html Note that replies from an SMS user to an e-mail recipient are NOT handled transparently. This is, unfortunately, a limitation of SMS not supporting any attributes that would allow for the maintaining of a conversation. (The only way around this is if it is possible for you to allocate at least 20 phone numbers on which you can send and receive messages. It is then possible to use different sender phone numbers for e-mail to SMS from different e-mail senders. When the SMS user replies back to a sender phone number, it can be matched up with the original e-mail sender ... assuming that the use of the number pool has not wrapped back around. This is a very difficult concept to explain.) -bn | |||
