Re: SMS as server infos

[Chris DiTrani <chris@livedata.com>]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 08:56, Ahsan Ali wrote:
> Most cell phone carriers have websites where you can go and SMS one of
> their subscribers for free. Often called "Internet Chat" or
> "Web-2-SMS" or something similar.
> 
> Using a HTTP POST means you put together something that will go to
> that particular site and do a HTTP POST (same as you typing something
> into some fields on a web page and clicking "send" or "submit" on the
> page) to send a line of text or a message to your particular number.
> 

Yes. If you find your cell provider's web portal to sms (my provers:
http://www.mymmode.com/messagecenter/), either by looking at the source
html or worst case sniffing the packet when submitting the form you can
figure out what the data posted to the server looks like and emulate
that from a script (probably 1/2 dozen lines of Python code). This
approach is a hack since it's depending on a private interface (the
format of the posted data and url itself) that can be changed at any
time (i.e. you wouldn't want to build a critical notification system
around it), so substituting  a real sms api or toolset for the post to
your cell provider would probably be better. Using a already available
package that wraps all this up would be better still, but I don't have
any experience with that.

CD