June 10, 2009

Make Your Own Email2SMS Server

It is not too difficult to set-up your own Email2SMS server using Postfix, Maildrop and some SMS Gateway. The Bulletin.net SMS Gateway (Connect) is one of the best as they have the patent on 2-way, threaded SMS messaging and it is very fast (carrier grade). The trick is to set-up Postfix with an email catchall. So, you can then send emails to <mobile number>@yourdomain.com and these will be diverted to the catchall. Maildrop will then allow you to intercept these emails, using a mailfilter script, and pass them on to some script. I used a PHP CLI script to do the job. In the PHP script I authenticate the email sender to see if they are registered to use my Email2SMS service. Contact me at mark at azurebell dot co dot nz for more info.