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How to Send Email to SMS Cell Phones, By Carrier [Telecom]

Earlier today I came across an interesting emergency alert service for residents of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), California.

As they state on the "About" page ():

" AlertSCC is a free, easy, and confidential emergency alert service " built on the BlackBoard Connect platform, which is used by counties, " school districts, colleges, and other entities around the country. " The system utilizes telephone voice messages, emails, and text " messages to send alerts. " " The County of Santa Clara has purchased 911 and 411 databases for " the system. Email addresses and phone numbers for mobile devices " must be registered with the system (via this website) to receive " alerts. This alert system is an integral piece of a comprehensive " emergency communications system that the County and cities will " use to communicate with the public during an emergency.

Intrigued, I first examined the Blackboard Connect page:

I then wanted to sign up for the service in my county and was puzzled by the question "SMS telephone number?". A Google search on "SMS telephone number format" revealed this URL:

and then I recognized that was how email can be sent to a cellphone and I had forgotten the format for my carrier, AT&T Wireless, since it's been ages since I setup the servers at work (I'm now retired) to call me whenever overtemp, power outage, and other problems hit the data centers.

I hope the above URL will prove useful to others, but I'm curious why they list Cingular Wireless and Cellular One. In 1992 I signed up with Cellular One for my first cellphone account and I've kept the account all the way through Cingular to AT&T today (with incredible service and what seems a perpetual monthly free 5,000 minutes among other things; no joke: no dropped calls and extremely strong signal anywhere I travel in the SF Bay Area).

Back to the Blackboard Connect: they state on their web pages:

" MASS NOTIFICATION " " The Blackboard Connect service provides millions nationwide " with time-sensitive information ? via voice, text, e-mail and " more. It?s the proven way to alert your stakeholders and enhance " their safety by keeping them informed, involved and prepared.

Anyone here know HOW they can do that without swamping COs and the cellphone service carriers?

Reply to
Thad Floryan
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On Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:56:23 -0400, Thad Floryan wrote, asking inter alia:

They may all be at&t today, but quite possibly current subscribers who originally began with one of the two companies named will still have the same SMS email addresses as when their service began.

Certainly the analogous address-domain retention holds for the email addresses of folks originally using PacBell, SNET, SWBell, SBCGlobal, et al., as ISPs. There'd have been far too much user-name clobbering had they all gotten converted to *@att.net from their original *@pacbell.net, *@snet.net, etc. addresses.

But don't quote me -- I'm just hazarding a guess here :-) .

Cheers, then, and a large grain of salt, -- tlvp

-- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP

Reply to
tlvp

It occurs to *me* that this service would be an ideal way for somebody to spam a whole lot of people very easily.

I went to the link provided and the list of company names and addresses appears to be *really* old. Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless, and AT&T PCS, haven't existed in years!

As I point out this appears to be an old list with the accuracy of it questioned (at least by me.)

Reply to
Joseph Singer

In theory, yes, but the fact pricing isn't anywhere I could find on their web pages strongly suggests it costs more than (most) spammers would be willing to spend, thus not a problem especially when looking at the current users which are all mostly municipal governments and school systems.

As another respondent wrote, continuing/grandfathering the old domains is common as companies are acquired and/or merged as I found doing some Googling.

I now agree, especially given what I now know works with my carrier.

FWIW, this appears to be a better resource.

Reply to
Thad Floryan

As I replied earlier, further searching shows the service is exclusively for governments, cities, universities and schools, so I don't see any reason to be concerned about spamming from its users.

Harvard MA just implemented it this past week and this article explains why it's now a vital part of their community service:

Other case studies can be found here (in PDF form):

Some independent background info about it is here:

and 1 out of 6 college students are connected to their local services using it per:

Reuters profile and financial report about them:

Wall Street Journal article:

Arrgh, what with so many schools, cities and even Silicon Valley now using it, I wish I had invested in it back when I was working. :-)

Reply to
Thad Floryan
[ sniiipppppp, regarding SMS and other e-notification systems]

And four out of five English teachers are pulling their hair out when reading that url...

Reply to
danny burstein

Yeah, isn't soceity" - whoops I believe that's actually spelt "society" - falling apart! ;-]

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.

Reply to
David Clayton

In article ,

And even _that_ is an incomplete statement. Weird, isn't it, that 'wier' and 'weir' both sound the same and _mean_ the same?

For those who care, 'weir' is the preferred spelling. And, no, 'weir' and 'weird' have nothing in common, except the spelling.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

I wish AT&T had done this with their attworldnet.com domain. I had a customer at her wits end over the change to att.net because every user name she could think of had already been taken. The woman is in her early 80s and was very frustrated at what AT&T had done to her.

Reply to
David Kaye

On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:38:06 -0400, after what danny burstein wrote, the Moderator added:

Well, there are some further weird exceptions, n'est-ce pas?

Cheers, -- tlvp

-- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP

Reply to
tlvp

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