An example: SMS registration dialogue

This is an awesome module, i had the same experience as you and am interested in the same. There is an older related issue in the queue that recently got a related response and potentially some revival, marked it as active again and hopefully we can get something integrated between SMS framework and mailhandler/mailsave by rallying the troops.. http://drupal.org/node/416974

Alrightie. I experienced the same as you, when I tested this module I received an SMS from a random, seemingly unique to me phone number that increments each time I receive a notification of this type. I am familiar with this from server notifications primarily, but was always unsure of how/why they came in like they do. My best guess without knowing much about it specifically is that some sort of headers or routing information is not sent from the person sending the message (ie: us with the sms framework module).

I believe the issue or misunderstanding we are having is how we can use SMS framework (with or without help from something like Mailhandler) to both send SMS notifications to users, allow users to reply to messages they receive, and allow us be able to do stuff with their reply. So in essence we would need to set where the email address reply-to or what have you to allow users to respond to a constant (email) address and allow us to do stuff when messages are received at that email address (like mailhandler does, but its not geared towards SMS so there are not neat features like verification and send to phone, in an SMS context).

So what that means is that this would require a similar approach, where it would have to periodically check an email box, which mailhandler does via cron with a configured (username, server, password, etc) email account. This is why perhaps we should be questing after an integration between these two modules as it seems like SMS Framework is simply not geared for the same thing that Mailhandler is, while it appears that what we may want is a mix of the two. Another part of the confusion in the other thread is that they did indeed implement some feature for incoming, but it appears that that only applies to the context of a true SMS gateway and service, at least with the out of the box Email Gateway. Perhaps its as simple (if technically possible) as allowing SMS framework module users to specify the From field that way when a user receives it and decides to reply, we can just specify an email address handled by mailhandler so you can work with the incoming email there and we could still implement the SMS framework based functions for sending a reply back to the user from the mailhandler callback.

Hi vishun and dmcw, as I mentioned we have been dealing with this set of issues over at http://vozmob.net, and have developed some working solutions.

For example, we use sms_registration module to send an sms back to a user after their first post (via mailhandler), asking if they want to change their randomized name to a username they choose, and if they reply that message goes to a separate 'registrar' email box, we check it with mailhandler and use the name they sent as the new username.

Configuration documentation is here: http://dev.vozmob.net/projects/vozmob/wiki/Sending_Stories_to_Phones and here: http://dev.vozmob.net/projects/vozmob/wiki/Configuration