SMS Problem with "@" character

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Des - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Desosms

Post Number: 778
Registered: 08-2008
Posted on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - 04:24 pm:   
From an e-mail tech support inquiry ...

quote:

We have been looking into the issue of the sms messages via email to mobile numbers failing. It seems the only time the message fails is when an “@” symbol is used in either the message, the title or the sender details. One of our team has managed to stop the sender address being sent from your SMS NOW client and this stopped the errors as long as a “@” symbol isn’t present in the actual message. So this indicated a problem with the SMS NOW SMPP client.

Since then we have tried numerous charters and all seem to be working apart from the @ symbol.

We then took a capture of the SMS Now packet leaving the machining heading to our SMSC, when this was intercepted we saw the highlighted hexadecimal figure below at 00 when it should be 40. This seems to be the bases of our whole problem... can you find a fix for this problem?

FYI – This also happens when a message is sent from the SMS Now GUI.



By default, NowSMS uses the GSM character set for sending out text messages via SMPP.

In the GSM character set, the "@" character is encoded as a null character.

Some SMSCs expect the standard US/Western European ASCII character set to be used instead. NowSMS can be configured to use this character set via a configuration setting.

To configure the use of the ASCII character set, go into "Advanced Settings" for the SMPP connection in NowSMS, and change the "SMSC Character Set" to "iso-8859-1". (Go to the "SMSC" list, highlight the SMPP connection and press "Properties", then select "Advanced Settings".)

--
Des
NowSMS Support
Des - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Desosms

Post Number: 793
Registered: 08-2008
Posted on Thursday, May 14, 2009 - 03:04 pm:   
And the query continues ... the action above that should have resolved the problem, created a new problem:

quote:

Hi Now SMS,

That seems to have works and now any @ symbols in the message appear as they should and there are no meshed messages.

However we are now experiencing the problem of when the messages are sent out from the email account they arrive at the mobile phone as broadcast messages and not SMS text message; i.e. it does not save in the inbox. Once you click ok on the phone you can’t read that message again.

Is there a setting we can change for this? Or can you offer us some kind of fix?



This is truly bizarre. The type of message that is described here (appears on screen but does not appear in the inbox) is a "flash" message.

For some reason, this particular SMSC is now treating each message as if the "Class 0" attribute is set.

There is no logical reason for this. One can only conclude that the SMSC is confused about the configuration setting that specifies the character set.

There is one other setting, a hidden setting, that tells NowSMS to use ASCII/iso-8859-1 as the character set for encoding the message text ... however not explicitly setting the character set flag to indicate the character set encoding. This setting will probably work for this SMPP connection.

To apply this setting, it is necessary to manually edit SMSGW.INI. Under the [SMPP - host:port] section header, locate the following statement:

SMSCCharset=iso-8859-1

Underneath that statement, add the following line:

SMSCCharsetDefault=Yes

Restart the NowSMS SMS service for this setting to take effect.

I expect this will resolve both issues.

--
Des
NowSMS Support
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