Show HN: Send SMS to your number for free from shell | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Send SMS to your number for free from shell

github.com

121 pointsoxplot35 comments

http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-uptime-monitor/21060/

This Google doc script monitors your websites and sends an SMS to alert you when down. It uses the same "Calendar->SMS" feature.

The script there onky sends an email. I think this is the one you meant to link to: http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-monitoring-with-sms-a...

I just send E-mail (via a command line script) to my cell number via by own GMail account. How is this different or better?

Not all carriers offer email-to-sms functionality.

Doesn't that only work for US numbers?

It varies by carrier.

More specifically, it varies by carrier legacy system. Finding the correct email-to-SMS address construction (usually some variant of phonenumber@domain.tld) may take some poking around, and it's not uncommon for the domain.tld portion to refer to some prior carrier acquired by the nominal provider (e.g.: your AT&T wireless number might have a cingular.com address, though don't quote me on that).

That said: it typically works and is fairly reliable once you've identified your gateway.

No, not at all. This is the best list I know of--super helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

That's a US functionality since you pay for incoming text messages. Other countries have no way to fund incoming texts as they're free.

That should be the default in the US too. Either that, or carriers should be required to offer people the ability to opt out of SMS.

Wish this worked through Google Voice.

EDIT: http://brettterpstra.com/2010/11/19/sms-from-the-command-lin...

Oh nice, NONE of this things (or text message notifications) ever work with Google Voice because it doesn't support shortcodes =-(

Wouldn't that be banned if it became somewhat popular?

No, that's why they have rate limiting: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/pricing

I doubt that the volume of API requests originating from this script would generate even a blip on Google's radar.

And this is interesting why?

echo 'hello world' | mail -s "message" <number>@cingularme.com

Not all carriers offer an email to sms gateway. As far as I know here in the UK none do.

That is why this is interesting.

As is the case here in New Zealand and many other countries.

Fortunately, most of them do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile etc. If you want to text somebody else, you'll have to figure out their carrier first though. :(

Is their a way determine their carrier without asking?

Most of US-based do. No such luck in here (Czech).

Most VoIP providers have a "number lookup" feature. For example, here is my number looked up on CallWithUs:

http://cl.ly/image/1l1g071h1d0C

You can create an unfunded account with them and use the lookup feature, if I'm not mistaken. (Though I don't recommend doing so, it's not nice!)

The central register for area code + prefix is here:

http://www.nanpa.com/reports/reports_cocodes_assign.html

However, sometimes the companies listed are subsidiaries and you can't tell the 'major' cellular provider for someone at a particular number.

In the US, does number portability between networks exist? In NZ, it causes problems with SMS gateways, which seem to (in general) naively use the prefix as the sole means of identifying which operator for a number.

Not too long ago I made a service, http://textbelt.com, that wraps many email-to-SMS gateways with a simple API:

  curl http://textbelt.com/text -d number=5551234567 -d "message=Blah"

This seems to be using a hack I also figured out back when I was in high school, working on a project. I also wrote about it years later on my blog[0]. If you look at the source it creates an event with an sms remainder but the time of the event and the scheduled time of the remainder are created in such way that the remainder is sent immediately. There's also a low limit on the number of characters you can use (~60).

[0]: http://www.randomshouting.com/2011/02/06/Free-SMS-notificati...

I blogged about this ~4 years ago :) http://www.codelord.net/2009/02/26/sending-sms-using-google-...

one can use this to add a "text me" button to a Contact page.

You can also use https://github.com/bratta/googlevoiceapi

On my mobile right now so cannot use this just yet, does anybody know if this works in the UK? (with three mobile network)

Or you can send yourself a push notification. Services like Notifo provide HTTP API that you can use in your scripts.

I use IFTTT to send SMS. for example, let IFTTT to monitor GMail, and notify you by SMS. It's easier to send email.

I'm guessing this doesn't work for Canadian numbers.

Not even if you postpend 'eh' to the 10 digits?

Hope this doesn't lead to text bombs

To yourself?

Why, you can set up an instance to someone's number that you can use to send messages to that person.

I'm fairly certain Google requires you enter a confirmation code when setting up a phone number (the code is sent via SMS to the phone) for specifically this reason. It's not as though this is the only piece of software using the Calendar API; Google has already had to think of these potential exploits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com