Sms for text messages in macports

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2022, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

> Every cell phone provider, or at least just about every US cell phone 
> provider, has an email to SMS gateway. It's free for someone sending 
> email to it, not necessarily for the recipient. The problem is you have 
> to know the provider for a given number, and AFAIK, there's no 
> particularly easy way to do that automatically and scriptably (so you 
> can generate an email address for the correct gateway). MMS gateways 
> also exist, although the acceptable MIME types and size/complexity 
> limits for attachments may be tedious to discover.

I've seen a reference to his before; the receiver pays to receive mobile 
calls in the USA?  In Australia it's the sender who pays (of course).  
And I believe that mobile phones (what you call cellular phones) don't 
have their own prefix?  We reserve "04" for that; at one time you could 
even tell which provider it was, but now you get to keep your number when 
you change providers.

But to bring this back on topic...

> Alternatives: a service (some free for small volumes only) that can send 
> SMS from a computer.  Or Asterisk plus extensions, to set yourself up a 
> full VoIP PBX...except that will need some paid service too, to connect 
> to. But it will do a lot more than just send (or receive) SMS, it could 
> forward phone calls, with proper hardware interfaces drive either old 
> fashioned or VoiP phones, etc. It looks like a lot of work and learning 
> as well as expense, though, and really ought to have a dedicated server, 
> too, although that's not absolutely necessary.

We had that in a previous $JOB; if Nagios (a general system monitor) 
detected something that triggered a rule then a set of users would receive 
a brief SMS, sent from a GSM modem.  I looked at this for my own LAN, but 
it ain't cheap...

-- Dave