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I am looking for a way to send SMS within my c# application and all I have found is send the SMS in an email fashion.

I want to send SMS in Canada/Usa.

What I found works list this. Send an email to 5555555555@rogers.com ..

Has anyone done this before? Is there any web services that can achieve this?

Thanks a lot

Baral
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1 Answers1

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This part of my answer is very region-specific, but given your example I'd like to point out that Rogers in Canada won't simply deliver the email body as an SMS to the target phone number as you'd expect:

"Welcome to Rogers Email to SMS. You have mail, but are not subscribed: reply "Yes" to this message to subscribe"

I've specifically dealt with Rogers before on this, and even once the user subscribes all they're going to get is SMS messages from Rogers saying there is a message waiting for them - they will then have to respond to Rogers to actually retrieve their messages.

I've also experienced substantial time delays for email to SMS delivery on Rogers - sometimes longer than an hour (and occasionally no delivery of the message at all) - so if they're time-sensitive messages or ones that can't be lost, I'd avoid this route.

My recommendation in general is to use an actual SMS gateway service to send the messages - this way you don't even need to know their carrier.

My recommendation for a service to do this is the Simple Notification Service from Amazon Web Services, or Twilio SMS. Both cost money, but if it's low volume than this will save you days of debugging. The SNS free tier will let you send 100 SMS messages for free each month, and additional messages will only cost 0.75 cents per afterwards.

Ryan Weir
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  • Can SNS send SMS in Europe as well? Did not see any restrictions on their site but no region either – TimothyP Mar 05 '13 at 15:40
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    Sorry, I was wrong and SNS apparently only supports US numbers right now http://aws.amazon.com/sns/faqs/#53a - however Twilio supports 196 countries including 50 in the EU http://www.twilio.com/international – Ryan Weir Mar 05 '13 at 15:45
  • ok thnx for the info :) – TimothyP Mar 05 '13 at 15:56
  • Officially SNS does not work in Canada. However, I was using SNS for Canada numbers and it work perfectly for the last 2 years. Now, somehow it stopped working around 6 months ago. I used Twilio before though, but the SNS topics management with both email/SMS and other endpoints is great. – Philibert Perusse Apr 26 '15 at 19:39