sending text message from PC

emailing [email protected] sends the email as a text
message to the target phone.
How do you include the 'callback number' in the transmission as the internet
app http://messaging.sprintpcs.com does?
I want the recipient to have the 'call' option when they receive the text
message but I also want the benefit of having a record of text messages
sent - this makes the web app an undesirable solution.

---

› See More: sending text message from PC

It looks to me that almost the feature you want is built-in, if you
include your phone number in the body of the message.

I just sent an email to my Samsung A680's (firmware YA28)
[email protected]. At the start of the body of the
message I put my home phone number as xxx-yyy-zzzz. You can experiment
with other placement and format.

After receiving the SMS message, I pressed the right-hand softkey
labeled "options" and then chose menu item 1 "Call" and the phone dialed
the number it was able to extract from the SMS message. Also, menu item
5 is "Save #" which extracts the number to save in the handset's phonebook.

There was not a softkey labeled "call", so you'll have to educate your
correspondents to press Options ("Press Options then 1 to call me" eats
up 31 characters). And sending via email gives you a record that the
message left your email system but doesn't guarantee it reached Sprint
nor the handset.

Mike W wrote:
> emailing [email protected] sends the email as a text
> message to the target phone.
> How do you include the 'callback number' in the transmission as the internet
> app http://messaging.sprintpcs.com does?
> I want the recipient to have the 'call' option when they receive the text
> message but I also want the benefit of having a record of text messages
> sent - this makes the web app an undesirable solution.
>

--
Frank Harris in San Francisco with an A680

Frank,
That is good information. I was not aware of the Options > Call feature
when the number is included in the text message. Placing the number in the
message does eat up 12 characters when placed in the body. When you send
from messaging.sprintpcs.com the left softkey is 'Call' instead of reply and
the number isn't listed in the message body. This seems to conserve valuble
message body character space. I'd still like to know how to do this like
the sprint site, but I do value your response as I learned something cool
from it.

-mike

"Frank Harris" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> It looks to me that almost the feature you want is built-in, if you
> include your phone number in the body of the message.
>
> I just sent an email to my Samsung A680's (firmware YA28)
> [email protected]. At the start of the body of the
> message I put my home phone number as xxx-yyy-zzzz. You can experiment
> with other placement and format.
>
> After receiving the SMS message, I pressed the right-hand softkey labeled
> "options" and then chose menu item 1 "Call" and the phone dialed the
> number it was able to extract from the SMS message. Also, menu item 5 is
> "Save #" which extracts the number to save in the handset's phonebook.
>
> There was not a softkey labeled "call", so you'll have to educate your
> correspondents to press Options ("Press Options then 1 to call me" eats up
> 31 characters). And sending via email gives you a record that the message
> left your email system but doesn't guarantee it reached Sprint nor the
> handset.
>
> Mike W wrote:
>> emailing [email protected] sends the email as a text
>> message to the target phone.
>> How do you include the 'callback number' in the transmission as the
>> internet app http://messaging.sprintpcs.com does?
>> I want the recipient to have the 'call' option when they receive the text
>> message but I also want the benefit of having a record of text messages
>> sent - this makes the web app an undesirable solution.
>>
>
> --
> Frank Harris in San Francisco with an A680

Mike W wrote:
> Frank,
> That is good information. I was not aware of the Options > Call
> feature when the number is included in the text message. Placing the
> number in the message does eat up 12 characters when placed in the
> body. When you send from messaging.sprintpcs.com the left softkey is
> 'Call' instead of reply and the number isn't listed in the message
> body. This seems to conserve valuble message body character space.
> I'd still like to know how to do this like the sprint site, but I do
> value your response as I learned something cool from it.
>

I don't think there is a way to get it to work like the Sprint Website
(or from the phone) when using the email gateway. For one thing (IIRC)
when emailing the "From" field counts towards the 160 character count.
So does the subject line (perhaps even the word "Subject" itself). Most
email get CRs (LFs too?) added, so that eats up a few characters as
well.

The most conservative method, that I know of, is to leave the subject
blank, and use a reply address that isn't very long. Also, at least on
my phone, you don't need the dashes to dial a phone number from the
message body. You could also place your phone number as the subject, but
I suspect that will cost you due to the word "Subject: " being added
(plus another CR!).

Personally, I wish there was some sort of "truncated" flag that would
let the sender know they didn't receive the complete message (I could
have sworn, years-ago, that SPCS used to do this). There's nothing like
getting an SMS that ends with something like "We nailed the big
project..." only to miss "...unfortunately it was later cancelled." <g>

--
Mike

In article <[email protected]>, "Tinman" <[email protected]> wrote:
>Mike W wrote:
>> Placing the
>> number in the message does eat up 12 characters when placed in the
>> body. When you send from messaging.sprintpcs.com the left softkey is
>> 'Call' instead of reply and the number isn't listed in the message
>> body. This seems to conserve valuble message body character space.
>
>I don't think there is a way to get it to work like the Sprint Website
>(or from the phone) when using the email gateway. For one thing (IIRC)
>when emailing the "From" field counts towards the 160 character count.
>So does the subject line (perhaps even the word "Subject" itself).

Remembering that SMSs can use email destinations as well, the email/SMS
gateway would naturally fill in the reply field of an email->SMS with the
reply email address. In fact that does happen (at least when I email a
friend's VZW phone), as well as my Sprint phone.So I don't know of a
way to tell the gateway to use a phone number instead.

So true about precious characters for email-> SMS. I wrote a small
script to deal with many of the issues you raise here. It munges email
headers so that "Subjecct:" becomes ">>", it throws away redundant
white space (<CR><LF>), it stripes away unneeded HTML, it truncates
Subject fields to something reasonable, etc.

>Personally, I wish there was some sort of "truncated" flag that would
>let the sender know they didn't receive the complete message

and for emails from "good" domain (settable)s, it allows the continuation
of the body of an email across multiple SMSs (I set the limit to 3, but could
be any number), to capture more of the text of the email. I have found that
extending emails to 3 SMSs (about 400chars) catches enough of most
email content, including ebay bidding notices.

You'll definitely want unlimited text msging to do something like this...

Daniel Tso wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, "Tinman"
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Mike W wrote:
>>> Placing the
>>> number in the message does eat up 12 characters when placed in the
>>> body. When you send from messaging.sprintpcs.com the left softkey
>>> is 'Call' instead of reply and the number isn't listed in the
>>> message
>>> body. This seems to conserve valuble message body character space.
>>
>> I don't think there is a way to get it to work like the Sprint
>> Website (or from the phone) when using the email gateway. For one
>> thing (IIRC)
>> when emailing the "From" field counts towards the 160 character
>> count.
>> So does the subject line (perhaps even the word "Subject" itself).
>
> Remembering that SMSs can use email destinations as well, the
> email/SMS
> gateway would naturally fill in the reply field of an email->SMS with
> the
> reply email address. In fact that does happen (at least when I email a
> friend's VZW phone), as well as my Sprint phone.So I don't know of a
> way to tell the gateway to use a phone number instead.
>

I don't either. Most SMTP servers (at least the ones I use) won't allow
an illegal Reply To address (I tried changing my Reply To address to my
SPCS phone number). Even if that did work, I strongly suspect it would
still count against the character count.

Meanwhile, while logged into your account and sending to another SPCS
phone (haven't tested it with other carriers), a message sent via the
Website can contain all 160 characters, a callback number, and of course
the From line (SPCS username, which on my Treo I can tap on to reveal
the number).

As an example, I sent my wife a (SPCS) SMS from the Website, while I was
logged in. I entered exactly 160 characters in the message body, and a
bogus callback number.

When the message was received all 160 characters came through. Plus that
bogus callback number--plus my username in the From field (which could
be used to respond). Essentially, two callback numbers (plus a username)
were included in the SMS in addition to all 160 characters. In both
cases, the callback numbers contained dashes (which I omitted when
entering the callback number).

Conversely, I sent a message without being logged into SPCS's
Website--just like anyone can do. This form, albeit with the same URL
(http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/textmessaging/compose), only allows
sending to one SPCS phone, a 160 character message, and the callback
number.

Messages sent via the above system (I would assume designed for non-SPCS
customers) do indeed contain all 160 characters--plus the callback
number (dashes added automatically). But in this case the callback
number populates the "From" field (at least on my Treo).


> So true about precious characters for email-> SMS. I wrote a small
> script to deal with many of the issues you raise here. It munges email
> headers so that "Subjecct:" becomes ">>", it throws away redundant
> white space (<CR><LF>), it stripes away unneeded HTML, it truncates
> Subject fields to something reasonable, etc.
>
>> Personally, I wish there was some sort of "truncated" flag that would
>> let the sender know they didn't receive the complete message
>
> and for emails from "good" domain (settable)s, it allows the
> continuation
> of the body of an email across multiple SMSs (I set the limit to 3,
> but could
> be any number), to capture more of the text of the email. I have
> found that
> extending emails to 3 SMSs (about 400chars) catches enough of most
> email content, including ebay bidding notices.
>
> You'll definitely want unlimited text msging to do something like
> this...

I do have unlimited messaging.

However, I've noticed various changes in the SMS email gateway over the
years. At one point, and I might be mistaken about this, it used to
include the word "Truncated" at the end of the SMS (taking away valuable
characters to do it). Please note this was around five years ago, and
may have been a very brief policy (I also might be confusing it with the
PocketMail service, which IIRC I was still using at the time).

Then they were just truncated--no indication it occurred. I know this as
I used to have important email forwarded to my SMS address via
server-side forwarding.

Then the SMS gateway would reject large emails, stating "Too large" (or
something like that) in the bounce message. It didn't bounce all email
over 160 characters though (and I never bothered to find out what the
bounce threshold was, as it didn't seem consistent--once, one of two
identical emails came through, whereas the other bounced).

After the above change I was caught in an endless loop: large message
was forwarded from my server with the Reply To address being the same
address that is forwarded to SMS. SPCS email gateway bounces message,
containing the entire email plus the bounce text, back to that same
address. Bounce message is then forwarded to SPCS SMS... and, well,
pretty soon there were 100 MB of bounce messages (the limit) and I
wasn't in a position to correct the situation at the time.

Then they started bouncing messages that weren't much longer than 160
characters at all. This really ticked me off, as I was no longer
receiving--albeit just snippets--of important email at all (loop
scenario fixed, however). By this time Short Mail, kludge that it was,
was on its way out. Plus, the SMS indicator of a received Short Mail
didn't indicate even the sender. You had to log into Short Mail via the
phone's browser in order to even see who the sender was. Slow! (At one
point Short Mail's indicator SMS messages did indeed include the
sender's name--and by Short Mail I mean the email address that went to
[email protected], not sprintpcs.com)

So I changed to forwarding to my SPCS email address
([email protected]), and altered my SPCS email settings to send me an
SMS alert when a message arrives. While these SMS messages do not
contain any of the email text, at least they reveal the sender's name. I
was then able to decide whether it was worth logging into Vision,
plodding along with the phone's browser, to finally read the actual
email. Not a great solution, but it worked OK since I was only using a
cellphone (pre-Treo days).

After some recent testing it appears that now you can send large SMS
messages via email again, without having them bounce (just truncated).
However, it wouldn't surprise me if SPCS started bouncing again (prolly
not a good idea in the era of forged email headers).

I still would like to know that a message was truncated though. Since
SPCS SMSs can obviously contain extra information ("From" and "Callback
Number" in the same message) I believe it is quite possible for SPCS to
add some sort of truncated indicator.

Conversely, and of course you'd want unlimited text messaging for this,
I would like the option for the gateway itself to split up large email
messages into multiple SMS messages (with the ability to specify just
how many SMSs you're will to accept--and if the email exceeds that limit
end the last one with "Truncated."

I would further like the option to specify the order the split messages
are sent. In my case, I would want the first (split) message sent last
and the last split message sent first. This would allow recipients to
read them in the proper order without wondering why the last SMS they
received is actually the first part of a split message.

Yea, I'm dreaming if I really expect SPCS to provide the above option!
(Especially since the Website gateway is so easy to manipulate--until
they change things yet again.)


--
Mike | Most people don't realize that large pieces of
| coral, attached to the skull by common wood
| screws, can make a child look like a deer.