SMS Gateways and Instant Messenger APIs for .NET

By BylineJohn Dyer on

Mobile Phone Text Messages

I've been implimenting instant messaging alerts for assignment due dates. I first looked up the addresses for email-to-SMS for phone messages. I found this short page and this complete listing. Here are the most important North American mobile providers:

  • T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
  • Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
  • Cingular: phonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com
  • AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
  • Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
  • Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
  • Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
  • MetroPCS: phonenumber@mymetropcs.com

If you don't know which provider a person uses, then you can send a message to phonenumber@teleflip.com and it will be sent directly to the person (with a link to www.teleflip.com).

Update: Using the area code and prefix, you can look up the original "owner" of the prefix. The NANPA has a great site (there is also http://fonefinder.net/). The only problem is that with number portability, you cannot be that a number is still with the original provider. We moved from Sprint to Cingular and the NANPA shows our prefix as belonging to Sprint.

Instant Messaging

For IM, there are several great, open source libraries available for sending messages through the various IM providers using .NET. Here's what I've found so far. Most are written in C# and most are free to use, but I've listed a few commercial and/or Java libraries.

Most of these libraries are event driven and require that you create a messenger object and wait for some kind of OnConnect event before sending a message.

One more note. If you're behind a firewall that doesn't allow IM clients or if you really like AJAX/JavaScript, check out http://www.meebo.com/