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Not sure if this is the right section, feel free to move it if it needs to be moved.

I'm researching what's required to be able to have a process where a large institution like a college can have the faculty send/recieve emails/sms messages from students.

Ie, a prof might want to send an update (email/sms) to 500 students in here intro math classes. Or the students might have created study groups, and then want to be able to send msgs to the group members...

We're envisioning a frontend, where the user/prof can send out the email/msgs and the "box" would then handle the processesing and sending/managing/recieving of all the traffic.

So, what's the "box" called, what kind of software tech? It appears that the messaging servers that I've researched would handle this, but I'm not certain.

Thanks

MadHatter
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tom smith
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    Is this a joke? It's called an email server and they've only existed for at least the last two decades. – joeqwerty Mar 02 '13 at 22:08
  • joeqwerty - not a joke. aware of email servers, aware of their function and while it appears/(ed) they can do the job, wanted to get clarification. - sorry if that's to much to ask from you dude. – tom smith Mar 02 '13 at 22:52
  • We use a product called [Call Parents](http://www.the-contactgroup.com/products/call-parents/). It works quite well and has handled mass texting to inform parents of school closure in bad weather. I can't say how much it costs, though. – tombull89 Mar 03 '13 at 12:20

5 Answers5

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You're looking for a simple email server and a email-to-SMS gateway. The email server can be whatever kind of email server you're comfortable with. It doesn't need to be anything special.

The email-to-SMS gateway can be a product you buy in and run locally, a service you can sign up to, or whatever. There's nothing very exotic about this from your point of view, you're just sending an email to the gateway service containing the phone number of the person you want to send a SMS message to plus the contents of that message. Obviously, if you want to operate a local server then you'll need to provide connectivity onto your country's mobile network.

For example, colleges and universities here in the UK can use this service provided by the JANET academic network. The prime advantage of a service like this is that the service provider is buying service in bulk for all its customers, so you hopefully end up paying less per message than you would with an in house solution (especially when you've factored cost of hardware, support, etc).

To handle sending to groups of students, etc. is simply a matter of distribution lists - pretty much all the gateways I've seen can cope with this, though the 'how' is a detail you should consider carefully.

Rob Moir
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  • Hi Rob. -- Thanks. So this is looking like the solution.. But now, I'm trying to quickly get my head around what the attributes are that would influence the cost of the solution. - I'm assuming that the cost would be == mailServer+emailToSmsGateWay+bandwidth+hardware+hosting+support+utilityBill+miscSoftware - have I left anything out? – tom smith Mar 03 '13 at 00:25
  • @tomsmith it depends. You've presumably got a mail server already so that's a sunk cost, I'd suggest it doesn't need to be accounted for here (unless you have to expand email capacity for this). Bandwidth is a factor no matter what of course, plus whatever charges the telephony service impose for text messaging. The other charges differ between using a hosted service or hosting your own gateway. If the latter then software plus hardware plus support burden on your IT team. If the former then you'll still need to cost internal support even if all they do is phone the service provider. – Rob Moir Mar 03 '13 at 08:02
  • Hi RobM -- OK, and by telephony costs for sms msgs, you're referring to the cost of the sms msg for the receiving user, not for the generation of the sms msgs by the college/faculty. Although, if the student where to then send a reply sms msg, there would need to/probably be a cost back to the college for receiving the msgs. -- How the heck does a Facebook/LinkedIN/Etc.. manage this kind of process. There must be large scale services that handle this kind of thing, in order to scale up, and lower costs.. thanks again!!! – tom smith Mar 03 '13 at 16:47
  • @tomsmith fb / linkedIn are big enough to have a huge on-site system coded to do exactly what they want how they want it, and to buy sms message capacity from a telephony provider (here in the UK it's the sender that pays for a message, not the receiver, but I get the impression its the other way around for you?). In either case, yeah it's a pain. We've not found anything that quite does what we want, just 'close enough'. – Rob Moir Mar 03 '13 at 17:56
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Other folks had suggested few solutions focused on email sending, I will give you a clue regarding sms messaging:

  • use a ready Sms Gateway Device with a web-interface. This kind of device is put on your local network and can be accessed by your users (professors) with a web browser. Inside you could define groups of students (groups can be public - available to all users (professors) or private - available to a single user (professor) ).

An example of such a device is SMSEagle

  • use some software that manages your emails/groups/users. Integrate that software with email2sms gateway or make use of API (most often HTTP) of a sms gateway. In this solution you get both email and sms sent in one click. As about sms gateway for that you can go for online sms gateways like Clickatell (with per sms costs) or again use hardware sms gateway (cost per device).

  • consider volume of sent sms messages per day/hour. It could help you make a decission.

Radoslaw
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Just to give you yet another perspective. There are many cloud services that do bulk email and SMS broadcast. They all normally have API to push your data into. In Anturis we use Mailchimp for emails and BulkSMS for SMS as well as several other providers (for redundancy).

Meriadoc Brandybuck
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I would use a simple mailserver as backend and custom processing scripts (or custom server plugins) to forward mails as sms and vice versa, maybe in combination with a mailing list application for group messages.

In most Linux distributions its actually possible to assign an mailalias to a script and let everything send to that address be processed by the script.

Users can use their own, well known eMailclient to send notifications means no additional training. It should also be fairly simple to adept an mail webclient to your needs.

LordOfTheRats
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Not exactly what you are asking, but I believe one of the many Course Management Systems (CMS, but that 3-letter acronym has several uses) is the solution to your underlying problem. We use Moodle, reputed to be the most popular one. It is avaliable as a package for many Linux distributions.

vonbrand
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  • So you're saying 'just install moodle' and you can just start sending SMS messages through it somehow? With respect, I think if you want to propose this as a solution to the problem then you could at least make a stab at addressing how to configure it to solve the problem. – Rob Moir Mar 02 '13 at 23:19
  • No, moodle doesn't send SMS. And if I was a student there, I'd probably register some throwaway phone just to not need to wade through "extremely important" messages from all sorts of sources I'd care less about. With moodle you can access the contents to the courses you care about, when you want. It provides question/answer spaces, places to post news, and all sort of contents. – vonbrand Mar 02 '13 at 23:26
  • That's nice but a managed learning environment, as useful as they are, is not what the OP asked for. If they asked about MLEs would you point them to sendmail? Despite having Blackboard ourselves, we still have idential message requirements to the OPs - they're two seperate issues. – Rob Moir Mar 02 '13 at 23:29
  • @RobM, OP might not be aware of such systems... and they _do_ solve the underlying problems much better than a cobbled together set of mailing lists and a SMS gateway. – vonbrand Mar 02 '13 at 23:31
  • What underlying problem? We don't know what the op wants this for. – Rob Moir Mar 02 '13 at 23:42
  • @RobM, look for [X Y problem](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem) – vonbrand Mar 02 '13 at 23:48
  • I'm well aware of that principle, and have used it here plenty of times, so there's no need to patronise me. The point,which you seem to be missing, is that there's no sign here of someone trying to do *a* but implementing *b* as a bodge. Sometimes people ask about how to do *a* because they actually need to do *a* – Rob Moir Mar 03 '13 at 06:11
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    And let's not forget, CMS means _content_ management system. – Michael Hampton Mar 03 '13 at 08:07
  • Well, if trying to creatively rethink the question, I'd suggest some social network engine rather than CMS for this. – Meriadoc Brandybuck Mar 04 '13 at 20:44