Your machine send you an SMS message (on the Itineris^TM network)

You can send an SMS (Short Message System) message for free on the Itineris network by using Internet (you may wonder how do the guys make money, but after all, these are not your business). In order to do this, a message with the right format must be sent to their Web server.

I've written a very simple PERL script to send a message from a Unix workstation. For example, you type sms-itineris john "Hello John", and John's cell phone gets the message. Another possibility:

make -k | sms-itineris toto

And the result of the compilation is sent to John. Silly isn't it ? A last one:

$ cat ~/.forward
\tronche
"| grep -E '^(From:|Subject:)' | sms-itineris tronche"

And I'm notified of my incoming mail, even if I'd prefer not to hear about it... But I'm quite sure you'll find many more interesting usages.

The script

What you need

A machine with PERL installed.
An Internet connection.

How to get it ?

Just copy the script the script at your place, perform a chmod 755 sms-itineris (Unix, assuming you saved it under the name sms-itineris), et voila.

Features

You can type either sms-itineris target message, or sms-itineris target, and the message is read from the standard input. If the target is purely numerical, it's taken as the number itself, else a lookup is performed in the $HOME/.pager-calepin file, which must be a sequence of lines of the form:

name	number

The name and the number must be separated by tabs (\t). Example:

john		12345678
mum		87654321
marlene		00000000

NB: actually, you can append as many fields as you want. I've started using the third column as the name of the network (this will allow to use the same script for several networks some day). In that case, we get for instance:

john		12345678	itineris
mum		87654321	tam-tam
marlene		00000000	itineris

Another interesting capability of the Itineris gateway is to be notified of message delivery via email. To use this possibility, you just put -notify on the command line. For example :
sms-itineris toto -notify tronche@foo.bar.com 'Hello toto'.

Their server's script perform some checkings on the email address (one @ and only one, and at least one . behind the @), so I implemented the same, although I can't see any interest (the address may be wrong in many other ways).

Caveats

The thing is only a first try adapted from the Tam-tam script in 30 minutes (including analyzing the protocol used by their server), so don't expect much of it:

There is no handling of the errors that may occur, mainly while communicating with the gateway.
If the message is too long, it's silently truncated to 160 characters.
If the guys from Itineris change the protocol of their server, everything will blow up !

What if I use Windows or a Mac ?

I don't care much.

The script is written in PERL. Unlinke the Tam-Tam script, it is autonomous and doesn't use any external procees. It should work if the socket and connect calls are implemented with the same semantics as in Unix, but I haven't checked (yet). The use of the $HOME variable is hazardous at best.

If you try and it happens to work, be nice and send me a little message. And also if it doesn't work. Thank you in advance.

A last word.

One can send an SMS message on Itineris without a script by using their email gateway ! Just send a mail to number@sms.itineris.tm.fr.

DISCLAIMER

Itineris or France-Telecom and I have no relation with each other.

Christophe Tronche, ch@tronche.com

Your machine send you an SMS message (on the ItinerisTM network)