Re: [HC Evolution] SMS

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

> It seems to me that all this email-to-pager stuff should be hidden
> behind email-to-pager gateways.  Building knowledge of these various
> and sundry protocols directly in to end-user mail clients seems
> completely backwards.
>
> What cellular/pager services do *not* offer an email interface?
> I thought just about all the cellular providers accepted email now.
> Because they finally wised up and realized that it was easier for
> them to write a gateway once, than to re-train every single person
> who wanted to correspond with one of their customers (or worse, get
> code added to every single mail client.)

International ones :) Egypt as far as I know does not have an email
interface for SMS messages. I'm sure there are others :) There is a very
good site though called 'quios.com' (shift the vowels around if it doesn't
work). Anyway, it just recently partnered with slashdot.org (to send 'news'
items via SMS). That place can practically send messages to any part of the
world. It also provides an email interface for SMS messages I believe
(tagging 'visit www.quious.com' at the end).

> > Another thing that might be worth thinking about regarding this, is
> > that SMS messages can only be 160 characters long... So when you
> > compose a SMS-message, there should be some limit to how long the
> > message can be.
>
> This would also be Wrong, because 1: you can't know what the actual
> limit is, or will be in the future, and 2: people might be doing
> clever things (for example, Nat had a filter that stripped all of
> the vowels out of mail before it reached his phone, so the real
> limit was 160 consonants and spaces.)

There is a 'limit' on Message size through SMS I believe. If not in the
protocol, then its in the mobiles themselves. Anyone out there familiar with
the SMS protocol that can verify this?

Anyway - Even if somebody does do something clever with thir mail->SMS
interface it is not the responsibility of the SMS sender (Evolution?) to be
aware or even responsible for that (there is no way to reliably predict what
everyone is doing). But if you know what somebody is doing (i.e. You know
that Nat is stripping vowels) then through Evolution or whatever you can
just write in all consonants and spaces :)

> It used to be that the gateways that the phone/pager providers used
> didn't know about MIME; I remember many occasions when someone would
> take out their pager and read aloud, "this is a cryptographically
> signed message in mime format.  Content type text plain charset iso
> eight eight five nine one.  Content transfer encoding quoted printable.
> Content...  Oops, that's all it says."
>
> The phone folks fixed this by making their gateways know about MIME.
> It wasn't necessary to make the mail client smart enough to know not
> to MIME-encapsulate things being sent to pagers (though that was
> suggested.)
>
> Sometimes if you ignore a problem long enough, it just goes away on
> its own.