sending sms / text messages with perl

tphyahoo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm interested in a service that would involve automatically processing messages received via sms.

My question, how hard is it to create an "sms server." A program that would receive text messages, and do something with them.

It seems there are various third party services to do this. I believe there are also modules for using these services on the cpan. Am I basically going to have to rely on these services, short of spending a year hacking such together from scratch? Or is there something like "apache for smses."

Finally: has anyone pointers towards doing this with perl?

There is code on the CPAN to do smsing but I'm not sure how mature it is. Before delving into this, I'm wondering if anyone out in monk land has used perl to send and/or receive smses.

Perhaps also of interest is wikipedia's entry on sms gateways

Comment on sending sms / text messages with perl

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Re: sending sms / text messages with perl by McDarren (Abbot) on Oct 19, 2006 at 15:40 UTC
Just recently we started using Clickatell for SMS escalations/notifications (I manage a NOC Team). I just threw together a pretty basic web interface to send messages via their HTTP API. It never occurred to me that somebody may have already written a module for this, but after reading your post just now I checked and found Net::SMS::Clickatell - heh.. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It does however look fairly basic, so I'm not sure if I'll start using it or not - I'll at least take a look at it. Anyway, to provide an answer to your final question¹ - yes, we use Perl at my workplace to send SMS messages all over the world via Clickatell. At the moment we are only using it for sending messages, but I do know that Clickatell do provide (for a cost) a two-way service - so I do plan to investigate this in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps I'll come back to this node and provide an update afterwards. Cheers, Darren :) 1. Which you appear to have re-worded since I posted my reply, which makes my response look a bit silly :( ..originally it was something like "Does anybody use Perl for sending/receiving SMS..."	[reply]
Re: sending sms / text messages with perl by neilwatson (Priest) on Oct 19, 2006 at 15:32 UTC
A previous employer of mine had a paging system that sent SMS messages via email. The wireless provider had an email address that was associated with the SMS phone. Neil Watson watson-wilson.ca	[reply]
Re: sending sms / text messages with perl by arunvelusamy (Monk) on Oct 23, 2006 at 06:58 UTC
Hi, I was in a similar suituation sometime back. I had a GSM modem connected to my linux box. I had to send and receive SMS via the gsm modem and do a background processing. I tried Device::Gsm to acheive this, but this fails to work on some scenarios. So i used a third party sms server tool called smsd, and i do the processing through my perl code. Regards, Arun Velusamy.	[reply]