From few months ago when i was using twitter, i was able to send twitter a SMS and when i go home and check my twitter page, i see the SMS i sent is on the website as a tweet. "That was great"
Now, i want to make the same in my website, so someone will send my website SMS as a command and my website will save this command in the db for future processing.
My problem that i don't know where to begin.
1- How users will send from around the world while there are different mobile companies in each country, or thats not a problem?
2- How my website will receive and read these SMS? there is a service for that?
3- Do you know any articles which simplify these tasks for me?
If someone worked on something like that before, please advice, any info will be helpful.
Contact your messaging provider, they will have solutions for each country they support.
In practice these things need to be agreed on a per-country bases (e.g. shortcodes etc), but the providers will do a lot to help.
Depending on what countries you want to cover, a single provider will probably do it - if you need absolutely every country with a mobile network, then you might need several, in which case integration is more complicated.
Typically they send either a HTTP POST, or a SMTP email to your server when they receive a message to your company's shortcode or shortcode prefix. But the integration options that exist are agreed per provider; there is no real standard or de-facto standard.
Well, first of all you need a sms-gateway. This is a service which you can buy a lot of places with varying prices. Your site can communicate with this gateway in different ways depending on the gateway-host.
Now, you can send messages to the number you bought on the sms-server and poll them (or push, again depending on your sms-provider) to your site. Just as with any other sms "IRL", you can use country codes to send a very costly SMS from around the globe. If you wish to keep this price lower, you need to rent a SMS-gateway which is internationalized or you need to rent one in each country...
.. In conclusion, doing this is not really a feasable option for your small "hobby-type" project :) Renting a SMS-gateway is rather cheap though, so the problem is really in your "multiple countries" request ..
I have created a web service for sending and receiving SMS messages. We are connecting through VPN to the SMS gateway of the local GSM operator: they have assigned us an public number as well as the option to send messages worldwide.
It doesn't matter if we send sms worldwide or receive from anyone - it just work :)
International sms might be a bit more expensive to send.
Edit:
theoretically there is a possibility to send sms thgrough an sip provider (like betamax /voipdiscount.com/) but this is not so fast and reliable comparing to traditional service.
I've had some success in the past with http://www.aspsms.com/
This is a paid service (per SMS) and be aware that you need to pay and FAX (yes, FAX...) your identity information to the before you get an API key.
Related
We have a service responsible for sending emails using AWS SES. This is working pretty well since we deployed it. But one strange thing start to happen a day ago (April 22, 2020). We have change nothing from our side and start to receives a lot of emails from Amazon SES:
What we already know:
As it is happening with almost all emails we sent, not all users all
are clicking in the "unsubscribe" link
The users are receiving the emails, once we know they are clicking in
the links inside of the emails
The emails we sent two days ago are exactly the same emails we are sending today. Both content and configuration
If anyone have past for this kind of problem, any help would be great
I haven't encountered the report abuse but have encountered the related bounce email issue several times. Not much is useful from FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/) but it does mention the reputation dashboard which you should be following to see if you are on the road to recovery.
Your tasks include:
1) Investigating if you send an email that could be considered abuse/spam under local laws of the receiver
At a minimum, you need to make sure you are offering the capability to unsubscribe and actually unsubscribe users in timely fashion. But also review content with an eye on local laws.
2) Ensure that users who do not want to receive email from you are removed.
This should be part of above.
3) Build up your reputation by increasing the percentage of valid emails.
This has been an issue for us in systems that send a small amount of email...it takes time to build up from a dip.
Remember - AWS wants to ensure it's multi-tenant mail servers remain whitelisted and that other AWS customers aren't impacted by any one potential bad actor.
I want to hst a 'send link to my phone feature' on my website. Can someone with server experience suggest to me which company I should go with based on my needs?
More info: I'll be using host gator to host my domain and its pages. I want this text me feature to be on the homepage and it could possibly send millions of links over the coming years (think positive right?) What should I do? I heard this type of feature costs money and I am doing budgeting now.
That depends on what you want to do. If you want an SMS gateway to send links to peoples' mobiles, then Txtlocal is a good option but they charge about 2p a per message I think
I want to enable event notifications for my customers. There are many possible ways to send notifications: emails, sms, XMPP/other IM, pre-recorded voice messages over SIP, phone-specific message push services, REST callbacks etc.
I don't want to develop all these transports myself, so I need a web service that can manage those notifications for customers. Also I don't want to store emails/phones/other personally identifiable information.
The notifications are transactional (i.e. it's not mass delivering same message to everyone). Paid solutions are welcome.
There is http://pagerduty.com but it is
designed to work within enterprise and not with outside customers
focused on full cycle of incident response as opposed to simple message delivery
So it puts more burden on respondents and I want something that requires zero effort for the users to setup.
Monitis is another example. It has multiple transports including Twitter, but again it's designed for insiders and not for service subscribers coming in bulk numbers.
Amazon SNS seems to be too low-level as it only manages delivery of push notifications, but for diplaying them I have to write a mobile app which I don't want.
XMPP servers as described in How best to deliver notifications to various IM / notification services? have traditionally supported the idea of different transports, but I'd like a third-party hosted service.
Twilio has only 2 transports: SMS and voice call and more oriented on full 2-side communications.
I cannot even find the right google keywords to search for the service/SaaS I want.
The question is, are there any such services? A sample of a few would give me an idea of what to look for.
This comes very late, perhaps too late but...
You should not need to implement any of the transport but you may be required to build some of the gateways and you will most likely need to assembly the application which talks to each of the gateways. You are not likely going to find a single service for this.
You've already outlined the strategy. You basically have these pieces:
transports
gateways
application
Each of the transports is accessed through some client via either an API or a CLI - so you'll need to figure out what your environment is. Java is probably a good choice but other cross-platform environments would likely work. Existing infrastructure like Apache ServiceMix has support for some of these transports:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SM/Components+list
and there may be other middle-ware with similar, distinct transports.
You will likely want a gateway for each provider for each transport type. You may be able to find a provider which adequately services multiple transports, e.g. Twilio's SMS and voice, but that will likely be the exception. You may also find that because of the differences in transports (and therefore functionality), it's more convenient to build a gateway for each transport type. So, you might have two configured providers in your SMS gateway, one for Twilio and one for Kannel, and you might have your Twilio account used in the SMS gateway and in the SIP gateway.
The final step is assembling your application into something meaningful. This might be something like:
sent.......: "Thanks for your purchase, ${username}!"
sent to the channels (i.e., provider-transport pair) configured, perhaps, by the user and being able to collect the response from the user:
response...: "It was a pleasure! --Bob"
You will need to store the basics of the each transport's endpoint, e.g., phone number for SMS, username for chat, etc., so if you have PII security issues to address you'll need to think though that. One option may be to turn all the PII over to each provider but you'll still need to keep each account for your users in each provider, and you will likely need to know something about the user, like "${username}" above, to personalize your notification appropriately within your application. So, removing all PII from your application seems unlikely.
I'm not sure how much this help but perhaps it gives you some ideas.
I am running a web service that currently sends confirmation emails out to new users via the gmail smtp servers. As I'm only getting a few new users each day, this hasn't been a problem.
I've recently added new features to the webapp that will require a customized message to be sent out to each user every day. Think of this as similar to the regular messages LinkedIn sends out that give you a status report on the activity in your network. Every user's message will be different. With thousands of users, this means thousands of unique messages will be sent each day.
Edit: I've since found that these types of email are called "transactional or relationship messages". Spamtacular has a good article on differentiating between marketing and transactional email.
I don't think using gmail's smtp servers will cut it anymore, but I don't know that for sure. I don't know what gmail's maximum outgoing messages per account is (it might be 100/day), but they limit outgoing mail to 500 recipients per message. I'm not sending a single message to 500 recipients, but I'm going to be sending 1000's of customized messages with each recipient getting one per day.
I'm interested to learn any best practices for doing this (especially for Java-based webapps). Here are some of my thoughts and concerns on it:
Should I set up my own outgoing mail server? If I do this, it seems like I'll have all sorts of other issues to worry about, such as preventing mail server abuse, monitoring bounces, allowing ways to opt-out of emails, etc. Are there any tools or services to help with this? Maybe something like OpenEMM or a services like MailChimp? But those seem focused more toward email marketing campaigns.
I don't think I should have the webapp itself handle sending emails as it currently is for new user signups. I'm thinking I should setup a separate messaging server that can access the same backend/datastore as the webapp. Thoughts on this?
Should I consider setting up some sort of message queueing service to help with this, such as JMS, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, etc.?
Do I need to provide users a way to opt-out? Do I need to flag these as bulk messages? I don't really consider these email marketing messages, but I'm unsure what is considered appropriate or proper netiquette.
Any advice is appreciated. I'm also very interested in open source tools or web services that simplify things and could help me to ramp up as quickly as possible.
Thanks!
With regard to your first question, yes, you should set up your own mail server. Using gmail to do this might work for a while, but they are likely to shut you down in short order when they see this kind of activity. You could sign up for a business account and use app engine to send messages. Here's a link with information about mail quotas for that service.
Regarding your second and third questions, It would be a good idea to have messages queued by the web app and sent out by a centralized service rather than having the app send out the messages on its own.
Usually I would just use a database table as a queue - the web app inserts rows for each message it wants to send. A service/scheduled task app would grab new messages out of the table and send them off. This gives you lots of flexibility if you want to switch mail servers later, better reliability if the mail server is down, easier diagnostics if there are problems with recipients not getting messages, and the ability to resend messages. As for using JMS/MQ to do this - probably not necessary. IMO a database table used as a queue would give you more flexibility here than an actualy JMS-based queue system.
As for opt outs, YES - you should give people a way to opt out. I don't think you need to flag the messages as bulk though.
On the architecture side of things I would definitely consider decoupling the sending of the emails from the main service via some form of asynchronous message queuing (or facsimile thereof using database as an intermediary). Another benefit of this approach is that if the SMPT server\network is down you could build in retry semantics, additionally for future scalability you could implement multiple mail senders reading from the same queue or implement sending throttling or scheduling (i.e send n messages per hour), etc etc.
does anybody know agood way in granting a connection from one service to another, so that both services benefits fromeach other?
I would like to have an easy but never the less safe way to do a connection between my server and another server, but I don't know how to do that.
It should be ...
easy, so that neither the user nor the service providers have to waste alot of time
traffic effecient, so that traffic is not wasted and conenction is fast
encrypted, so that no person in between can use the transmitted data
and it should be an open and flexible standard, so that there could be more connections to other services (with my server in the middle of this star connection and no connection in between all providers) and that I don't have to pay a fee ;).
the example in the title is something I think about, because when you have a twitter account you somehow connect facebook to your account and facebook can show your twitterfeeds on your account.
but I don't want a provider to gather a lot of information beside the really important one that the user want to transmit. so I don't want the provide to get the username of my user and I don't really need to know how my user is named there.
It's like a post-office box. you just have to know where to put your letter, but you don't need to know the box owner's name.
and I don't want the mail-carrier to know what he is delivering, so it should be encrypted.
every clue how to do that would be fine, because I don't know anything about this :)
thank you in advance, Andreas
What you need is OAuth, check out the "Getting Started" guide to learn all about it
And the wiki entry