Show HN: Send SMS to your number for free from shell

by oxplot • 14 years ago

121 35 14 years ago

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

I just send E-mail (via a command line script) to my cell number via by own GMail account. How is this different or better?

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Not all carriers offer email-to-sms functionality.

oxplot• 14 years ago

Doesn't that only work for US numbers?

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

It varies by carrier.

More specifically, it varies by carrier legacy system. Finding the correct email-to-SMS address construction (usually some variant of phonenumber@domain.tld) may take some poking around, and it's not uncommon for the domain.tld portion to refer to some prior carrier acquired by the nominal provider (e.g.: your AT&T wireless number might have a cingular.com address, though don't quote me on that).

That said: it typically works and is fairly reliable once you've identified your gateway.

mark-ruwt• 14 years ago

No, not at all. This is the best list I know of--super helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

joelhaasnoot• 14 years ago

That's a US functionality since you pay for incoming text messages. Other countries have no way to fund incoming texts as they're free.

RexRollman• 14 years ago

That should be the default in the US too. Either that, or carriers should be required to offer people the ability to opt out of SMS.

killahpriest2• 14 years ago

Wish this worked through Google Voice.

EDIT: http://brettterpstra.com/2010/11/19/sms-from-the-command-lin...

nnnnni• 14 years ago

Oh nice, NONE of this things (or text message notifications) ever work with Google Voice because it doesn't support shortcodes =-(

drpgq• 14 years ago

I'm guessing this doesn't work for Canadian numbers.

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Not even if you postpend 'eh' to the 10 digits?

surferbayarea• 14 years ago

And this is interesting why?

echo 'hello world' | mail -s "message" <number>@cingularme.com

samwillis• 14 years ago

Not all carriers offer an email to sms gateway. As far as I know here in the UK none do.

That is why this is interesting.

hrrsn• 14 years ago

As is the case here in New Zealand and many other countries.

killahpriest2• 14 years ago

Fortunately, most of them do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile etc. If you want to text somebody else, you'll have to figure out their carrier first though. :(

Is their a way determine their carrier without asking?

typpo• 14 years ago

Not too long ago I made a service, http://textbelt.com, that wraps many email-to-SMS gateways with a simple API:

  curl http://textbelt.com/text -d number=5551234567 -d "message=Blah"

jakozaur• 14 years ago

Wouldn't that be banned if it became somewhat popular?

oinksoft3• 14 years ago

No, that's why they have rate limiting: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/pricing

I doubt that the volume of API requests originating from this script would generate even a blip on Google's radar.

veverkap• 14 years ago

You can also use https://github.com/bratta/googlevoiceapi

mochizuki• 14 years ago

Hope this doesn't lead to text bombs

oinksoft3• 14 years ago

To yourself?

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

Why, you can set up an instance to someone's number that you can use to send messages to that person.

chintan• 14 years ago

http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-uptime-monitor/21060/

This Google doc script monitors your websites and sends an SMS to alert you when down. It uses the same "Calendar->SMS" feature.

Flenser• 14 years ago

The script there onky sends an email. I think this is the one you meant to link to: http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-monitoring-with-sms-a...

whocanfly• 14 years ago

one can use this to add a "text me" button to a Contact page.

xSwag• 14 years ago

On my mobile right now so cannot use this just yet, does anybody know if this works in the UK? (with three mobile network)

zdwalter• 14 years ago

I use IFTTT to send SMS. for example, let IFTTT to monitor GMail, and notify you by SMS. It's easier to send email.

Void_• 14 years ago

Or you can send yourself a push notification. Services like Notifo provide HTTP API that you can use in your scripts.

abyx• 14 years ago

I blogged about this ~4 years ago :) http://www.codelord.net/2009/02/26/sending-sms-using-google-...

schmrz• 14 years ago

This seems to be using a hack I also figured out back when I was in high school, working on a project. I also wrote about it years later on my blog[0]. If you look at the source it creates an event with an sms remainder but the time of the event and the scheduled time of the remainder are created in such way that the remainder is sent immediately. There's also a low limit on the number of characters you can use (~60).

[0] http://www.randomshouting.com/2011/02/06/Free-SMS-notificati...

Show HN: Send SMS to your number for free from shell

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