Re: Steep learning curve

[Warren Burstein]

I've got a phone that sends over 1,000 texts a day.  Most of them go to a phone that rotates between the support team and I feel sorry for whoever's turn it is to have the phone.  But then there were a few months when it was broken (I think the USB cable came out of the phone) and no one complained.  But the texts are a backup for emails so maybe it's not as mission-critical as it sounds ...

The only reason I noticed is that each spring the CEO has daily reminders of something personal sent to himself and to friends of his and on the first day he noticed that he didn't get one.

I wrote my own version of smsd, and I don't use the X version as X11 doesn't work through the firewall.  I've thought of having it do a small number of retries when there are problems and emailing me when it seems to be unplugged but since no one notices failures except for the CEO's personal thing, I'm hoping to avoid that.

But we only use it locally, because texts are billed to the sender where we are.  We also send a lot of texts in the US (no idea how many since I don't count those) using cell-providers' email-to-SMS gateways.  A while back one of them stopped working, I told our tech support to contact Verizon's (or whoever's) tech support, but they didn't get back to me, so either it got fixed, or they just gave up ;-)

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 4:42 PM Pawel Kot <gnokii@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Scot,

On Mon, Aug 16, 2021 at 7:40 PM Scot Rogers <scot.a.rogers@gmail.com> wrote:
> My name is Scot and I have a need to be able to send mass sms texts.

Just a disclaimer here: gnokii might not be your choice here. Possibly it is
more reasonable to use mass communication provider, such as Twilio, connect
through an API and use just that. You will have much better througput. With
gnokii you will be limited with serial sending by a single phone (or multiple
phones if you connect them).

> I have a ton of questions.  First, I downloaded and installed the
> software from the Ubuntu repository and it appears to be all there.
> I've started reading some of the info within the package, but I can't
> seem to find any solid guidance.

You need to configure gnokii first to talk to your device by editing
gnokiirc file. You can get some details under:
 - https://gnokii.org/docs.shtml
There is also a decent documentation in the sample gnokiirc:
 - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnokii.git/tree/Docs/sample/gnokiirc
and you can look through other documentation provided:
 - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnokii.git/tree/Docs

Our wiki is down for a couple of years but you can also find more detailed
reference at:
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20170616003101/http://wiki.gnokii.org/index.php/Main_Page
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20170616014824/http://wiki.gnokii.org/index.php/User's_Guide
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20170617085029/http://wiki.gnokii.org/index.php/Config
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20170705093631/http://wiki.gnokii.org/index.php/Config_options

> I can't seem to get Xgnokii to launch from the gui, and when I run it
> from terminal, I get an error list revolving around the phone not
> being connected - which it is not.  I don't have a phone, yet.  And

xgnokii would work only with phone connected and configured as far as
I remember.

> I'm not sure how to find a more recent model phone that accepts AT
> commands.   If I can get a proper phone I think it'll help a bit, and
> these old nokia phones are looking harder and harder to find.

I'm afraid I cannot help with this one. Actually I haven't used gnokii
in ages...

Cheers,
--
Pawel Kot
http://www.gnokii.org/

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