Mobile Phone Networks and the Physical World - Making Things Talk - page 393

Text-Messaging Interfaces
Text messaging is fast becoming the most common use for mobile phones. Many
people regard texts as less intrusive than voice calls in the flow of daily life. With a text
message, you can get information across quickly and with no introduction. In addition,
it's easy to send email to SMS, and vice versa; they're not platform-dependent—as
long as you have a mobile phone or email account. For situations where you need an
immediate, unobtrusive notification, or to give a single instruction, they work wonderfully.

SMS , or Short Messaging Service , began as a way of
sending information over the mobile phone networks'
signaling channel. The idea was to send bytes as part of
the data sent to signal incoming calls, but to do so when
there was no incoming call. These short messages could
be used for diagnostic purposes, to notify the receiver of
voicemail, or for other quick notifications. When SMS was
rolled out as a commercial service option for customers,
however, it became much more than that. SMS may be
limited to 140 characters per message, but people have
found many creative ways to pack a lot of info into those
140 characters.

Verizon: [e-mail]
Bell Canada: [e-mail]
Telenor Norway: [e-mail]
Telia Denmark: [e-mail]
Swisscom: [e-mail]
T-Mobile Austria: [e-mail]
T-Mobile Germany: [e-mail]
T-Mobile UK: [e-mail]

A longer list can be found at www.emailtextmessages.com
(warning: I have not verified every one of these). With U.S.
carriers, many expect a simple 10-digit phone number
without the leading country code (which is +1 for the
U.S.), but carriers in the U.S. and around the world tend
to be idiosyncratic about this. Check with your carrier's
customer support to find out how they handle it.

Almost all mobile carriers provide an SMS-to-email
gateway as part of their service, which means you can
send an SMS from an email client and receive SMS
messages in your inbox. To test this out, send a text
message from your phone, but instead of sending it to a
phone number, enter your email address as the destina-
tion. Depending on your carrier, it may be sent via MMS ,
or Multimedia Message Service , or it may simply go as an
SMS. Check your inbox, and you'll see a message from
yourself. Now you'll know the email address to use if you
want to send yourself a text message via email as well.
Most of the time it's simply your phone number @ your
carrier's email address. Here are some common SMS-
to-email servers for a few U.S., Canada, and European
carriers:

The PHP script on the next page creates a simple form
that lets you send a text message to any of the carriers
listed above, and a few others. Modified, it can be used as
an SMS gateway script for a networked device.

AT&T: [e-mail]
T-Mobile: [e-mail]
Virgin Mobile: [e-mail]
Sprint: [e-mail]