Email to SMS: The Quick Messaging Solution

Email to SMS can provide a number of travel companies with an easily implemented method of fast, reliable communication. This will allow them to stay in touch with travellers during times of crisis or natural disaster.

With a volcano, earthquakes and a number of other natural disasters affecting many travellers world wide in recent months, it’s safe to assume that SMS has come in handy for a great number of airlines and other bodies within the travel and hospitality industry. After all, many of their customers are not in the immediate vicinity of an internet connection, so email isn’t always a reliable option. And making hundreds of voice calls can become quite expensive. Companies who still need to implement a text messaging solution need only look toward email to SMS.

Email to SMS: How it Works

From a non-technical perspective email to SMS is by far the easiest to use: you just create a plain-text email, enter all the necessary details and hit ‘Send’.

So what are these necessary details? Let’s have a look:

Here’s an example message:

api_id:1234

user:xxxxxxxxx

password:xxxxxxxxxxx

to:1234567890,1234567890

text:This is my first test SMS

The ‘api_id’, ‘user’ and ‘password’ fields are used to identify the user and also the SMS technology (email to SMS in this case) to be used. These are acquired during the signup process. The rest of the required details are quite self-explanatory: ‘to’ refers to the destination number (multiple numbers must be separated by commas) and ‘text’ refers to the actual SMS message.

So far, so good.

Now here is the thing that makes email to SMS worth while, especially to those in the travel industry: messages can be sent with a delay to ensure that they are only delivered to the destination handset after x amount of minutes. This is especially handy when travellers in different time zones need to be contacted.

Here’s the complete message again with that option implemented:

api_id:1234

user:xxxxxxxxx

password:xxxxxxxxxxx

deliv_time:120

to:1234567890,1234567890

text:This is my first test SMS

In the above example the SMS message will only be sent 120 minutes after the email to SMS message has been sent.

Email to SMS: A Look Behind the Scenes

The fact that email to SMS doesn’t require any special software, or skills for that matter, is part of what makes it so appealing.  It is made possible by the SMTP application programming interface (API), SMTP being the technology built into virtually every recent operating system that makes outbound emails a possibility. This also means that there won’t be any trouble with existing software environments or firewalls where email is already used.

For more information about this useful technology, simply visit our email to SMS page…

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Tags: email to SMS, simplified SMS, SMTP API, travel SMS