[Gllug] SMS to email gateway

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, emacs.el wrote:

> Karanbir Singh wrote:
> > emacs.el wrote:
> >> Can anyone recommend a cheap SMS to email gateway service? I want
> >> users to be able to send a text to update a web calendar so it only
> >> needs to be one-way.
> > 
> > why not just connect a pay-as-you-go phone to your computer and
> > people send text msgs there ?
> > 
> 
> What kind of connector between the phone and the Linux machine? I'd
> also need to get it transferring messages automatically so that a
> script can retrieve values to update the web calendar. What kind of
> Linux/OSS programs can accomplish this?

It depends on the phone, old ones used serial which works trivially,
newer will need usb or bluetooth.  They all appear as a serial device,
bluetooth using rfcomm to create a /dev/rfcomm0, plus loads of faffing
depending on how automated your distribution is and how lucky you are,
usb should work by default giving a /dev/ttyUSB0 device.  You might have
to fight, add usbIDs to kernel headers, or piss around with pairing and
dbus and gtk only popups for PINs and other such mess.

Once you have a serial device attached to the phone, modem style AT
commands are sent to control the phone.  Nokia's can be controlled via
gnokii and some fork which can do things like take a photo and pull the
image off automatically over BT (sneaky).  There are almost certainly
loads of tools people have written, just do some cuil/yahoo/live/google
searches.

Otherwise you could just use basic shell scripts and echo stuff and read
from /dev/<serial device>

A 10 second google search got me:
http://designbuildtestrepeat.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/huawei-e220-on-linux-for-sms/

You'll need to google for your phone although it's likely to be similar
per manufacturer.  You can see from this article you can send and
receive SMSes quite easily.

There are limits to the speed this can work at vs an expensive pay-for
SMS service, you're always having to poll and pull off SMSes from a SIM
as fast as you can.

Damion - it's 02:30 can't sleep, working on a remote BT apple keyboard
uncomfortably in the lounge squinting at my 1920x1080 hdmi telly (which
is why I'm up late having just got it working, what a waste of time!
need to plug my normal 1024x768 monitor back in and sit on my desk
chair!).
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