Short Message Service (SMS)

Short Message Service (SMS) is an older term for the capability of electronic pagers (beepers) to receive text, now replaced by the mobile phone service now known as text messaging.

Within the United States, email messages in plain text (no HTML markup or attachments) can be routed to cell phones and most beepers as text messages. Some cell phone networks offer enhancements, such as image attachments. Most phone text messages contain fewer than forty characters.

To send an SMS or text message to a United States cell phone from your application:

  1. Create a correspondence rule with PhoneText as the correspondence type, the third key part.
  2. On the Corr tab, enter a plain text message that contains no HTML markup elements (such as <B> or <I> or <H1>. You can include JSP tags.
  3. Obtain an email address for the cell phone for the party. In the United States, most vendors use the format [email protected], where 999999999 is the ten digit phone number. For example, use [email protected] to reach a Verizon Wireless subscriber at phone 123-456-7890, or [email protected] to reach a T-Mobile USA subscriber with that number.
  4. Configure an Email Account data instance (Data-EmailAccount class) to connect to any Internet-attached email server.
  5. Add standard flow actions, flows, and activities to send the correspondence as an email message from your application.
  6. Vendor facilities will automatically route the text message to the cell phone.

For step-by-step instructions and an example, see the PDN article How to send an email as a Short Message Service message (PhoneText) .

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