Im looking for a cheep or free (i can run it on a personal server) system that will take cell numbers and send a txt msg to them. We want to use this as a paging system.

With this, is there a way to send txt msgs to multiple people in Google Voice if you have them saved as contacts?

11/9/2012 11:00:48 AM

most cellphone carriers have email domains for sending text messages to phones. ex: NXXNXXXXXX@txt.att.net for at&t.

There are 2 downsides to this. 1) the carriers might throttle you if you abuse it with tons of texts to tons of different places, especially if these are commercial in nature (since they want their cut. 2) if all you have is the phone # and no carrier, then you wont know what domain to append. You might could solve this by using a lookup service, but thats probably not free.

That said, for low volume texts to known numbers its an easy + free way to go.

11/9/2012 1:03:17 PM

if you send them a text via google voice once and get them to reply an email alias is generated with all the processing on google's side, if you have email forwarding/replying to texts enabled via google voice. you can use these aliases indefinitely from gmail so just use sendmail or whatever configured to the associated gmail and just send your alerts via that.

11/9/2012 2:03:38 PM