SMS via Email

Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? I was vaguely aware that it was possible to send an SMS via Email but I'd never had the need to do so up until today and so I'd never tried. However, being in Indonesia and using a local mobile phone network provider, I found that I wasn't able to send an SMS to Australia for whatever reason.

It was then that I read of the possibility of sending an SMS via Gmail provided one knew the SMS Gateway email address of the service provider associated with the phone number. To find the service provider, I used 160.com.au (the interface is shown in Figure 1):

Figure 1

Once I entered the number, I discovered that the service provider was Optus. It was then just a question of finding the SMS Gateway address of Optus. For this I used email2sms.info as shown in Figure 2:

As can be seen, there's no need for the international code prefix and there's a reminder to add a 0 when omitting this. I then sent my SMS/Email via Gmail and the message was sent. Currently I'm waiting for a reply.

POSTSCRIPT: this is the message I got back from Gmail at 11am today (Saturday 15th of September). The original email was sent on Friday, 14th September 2018 at 10:36:38 (Jakarta time +0700):

Gmail will try for a couple more days but I'd say that the message is not going to go through.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: as anticipated, it didn't make it. Ah well, so it goes.

Posterous

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to test out posterous and I'm putting it to the test by posting to my Pedogogical Posturing blog from Gmail. I succeeded in posting from Gmail to Twitter earlier. What happens is that the subject line of the email appears in Twitter followed by a link to posterous containing what was in the body of the email. Clearly, it's important to make good use of the subject line when using Gmail to post to Twitter via posterous. These indirect ways of posting to sites as Twitter can be useful if a country suddenly bans Twitter. This site allows simultaneous posting to all linked sites which in my case (so far) are Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and my two blogs in Blogger. However, there is the choice to post to none or only some of the linked sites. For this test, I've attached an image so it will interesting to see how posterous handles that in combination with this text. Here goes.

Well it did work out after a couple of tries. It didn't using the following email addresses:

• http://voodoo-guru.blogspot.com
• voodoo-guru.blogspot.com

However, it accepted www.voodoo-guru.blogspot.com oddly enough. The font however, is the default one that I don't use and the text is also left justified instead of the full justification that I use. What it means is that there is a little editing to do afterwards but all in all it works quite well.

Posted via email from seanreeves's posterous