[PLUG] Looking for a Simple Way to Send SMS to a Group

nathan w nathan at nathanewilliams.com
Tue Jun 7 02:05:15 UTC 2011


Maybe a quick php script to send mail to the sms gateway for the phone providers? I can send sms msgs from email via 5038675309 at sms.sprint.com... most other phone carriers offer the same service, u just have to research what the sms gateway is, and know the carrier for each number in your group.

----- Reply message -----
From: "Mark Phillips" <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>
Date: Mon, Jun 6, 2011 4:48 pm
Subject: [PLUG] Looking for a Simple Way to Send SMS to a Group
To: "Portland Linux Users Group" <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>

I have a club softball team, and we are going to nationals at the end of
June. We communicate very well using an email list, but when we are on the
road not everyone has access to email. I am looking for a simple way to

A. allow a member to send a broadcast SMS to everyone in the group. Not all
members have Internet services on their phone, so email is not an option.
B. allow a member to send an sms to a subset of the group, or an individual
member of the group.

I thought of this scenario, but it seems rather clumsy:
For A:
1. Use a google voice phone number as the broadcast number
2. have google voice send the sms message to an email address
3. have a python script forward the email via each carrier's email to sms
email address
For B:
4. modify the python script to look for a tag in the sms body (e.g.
"to:sammy"), and the just send the sms message to sammy, not the whole group

I am sure there is a better way to do this. I only need this capability for
10 days, so I really don't want to spend a lot of money on it. My users are
not technically savvy, so signing up for a twitter account is probably more
effort than they want to expend. If I give them a phone number and say "Send
text messages to this number", they will probably do it.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have!

Mark
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