
SMS over IRC - buovjaga
https://mndrix.blogspot.com/2018/06/sms-over-irc.html
======
orivej
An interesting alternative to SMS over XMPP/IRC over Twilio is SMS over XMPP
over your Android phone. This lets you send and receive SMS on the computer
and share the history with the phone. For this I'm using MAXS
([http://projectmaxs.org/](http://projectmaxs.org/)), an open source modular
system available on F-Droid and Play store where each module is installed
separately and provides a specific service over XMPP, such as receiving new
messages, reading old messages, querying location, etc.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I looked at MAXS once, but couldn't find anything about encrypting or signing
messages, which kinda killed it for me.

~~~
simlevesque
I use JMP.chat but I'm not exactly sure it is what you are looking for.

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bronco21016
Unless I’m looking in the wrong place, this seems like a good way to ring up a
massive bill. 10,000 messages/month doesn’t seem like a stretch. At
$0.0075/message that’s $75/month. Not exactly cheap just so you can SMS from
your favorite IRC client.

~~~
user9182031
Is there somewhere in the world that still charges per SMS?

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simmons
Like the author, I also rolled my own SMS-over-XMPP solution a few years ago.
One central ongoing frustration is that a lot of what people think is SMS
really ends up being MMS. Not only do I miss pictures, but people send group
texts that silently miss me, and messages over the SMS character limit are
also sent over MMS. It sends 160 characters over SMS, and the rest is chopped
off if you don't have MMS. Some (many/most?) messaging apps don't give you a
character count any more, so I can't even tell people to watch the
characters...

I believe Twilio has some sort of MMS support, so maybe this could be made to
work with their service. My VoIP provider doesn't support MMS, so I may have
to migrate to Twilio some day.

~~~
bfred_it
> messages over the SMS character limit are also sent over MMS. It sends 160
> characters over SMS, and the rest is chopped off if you don't have MMS

I've never seen my phone switch to MMS automatically because of the length.
I've had old black/white Nokias support concatenated SMS

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS)

~~~
simmons
I see. It may be that Concatenated SMS is what my VoIP provider is failing to
support. (I saw some talk once about fallback to MMS for long messages, but
maybe that was just speculation or an uncommon scenario.) I guess I'm in the
same boat either way. :/

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tramtrist
Using google voice and hangouts connected I have a libpurple connection for
hangouts in Bitlbee. I can send SMS through that connected interface via
voice/hangouts. Works well for me (especially when in China on business) I
also live in Japan and travel to EU about once a month. Keeping in touch with
my family/friends in US via my one phone number I've had since google voice
launched is quite useful...

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INTPenis
The author says in another post from 2017 that they had to abandon Google
Voice when they moved to Europe. I had no idea.

I'm in Europe and I've used Google Hangouts to audio and video call people
with Android phones for longer than 2017 so I have no idea what the author is
talking about. Clearly Google Voice must be something different because
Hangouts most likely "dials" over data.

Quick googling says Google Voice is PC to PC so no mention of SIP or GSM being
used.

Either way I think using IRC seems a bit outdated, especially when you're
trying to accomodate non-technical people.

XMPP would give more support for modern clients like Conversations for
example. And it's just as easily scriptable as IRC imo. You don't actually
touch XML, you use client libraries. So even if IRC is simple on the protocol
level XMPP is just as simple to script with.

~~~
kilburn
The fact that google voice _works_ in Europe is not the authors' qualm. His
qualm is that you cannot get an european number from google voice, nor call
european numbers for free, nor send sms messages to them, etc.. It just
"doesn't work" when your life is european-centric.

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asjo
Nice to see old protocols used for new purposes - I'm using nntp for some
things it wasn't designed for (mailing lists, RSS/Atom-feeds), but which fits
nicely.

I understand the wish not to be dependent on a third party - but isn't Twilio
such a dependency?

~~~
soneil
In my case, it's not wanting to avoid external dependencies - it's how hard
those dependencies are. An external that you can swap out in an afternoon is a
perfectly healthy vendor relationship. But if, eg, some machination flagged
your account out of the blue, and your only recourse is to stare blankly at
the screen in disbelief, this is not a healthy dependency.

So as long as other sms gateways/delivery services are available, his
dependency isn't "Twilio", it's "an sms gateway/delivery service".

~~~
kodablah
> So as long as other sms gateways/delivery services are available, his
> dependency isn't "Twilio", it's "an sms gateway/delivery service".

That depends of the depth of Twilio-specific integration and the ease of
abstraction of course. Author mentions converting custom statuses and the
like.

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fit2rule
I love this. Won't some distro'ers please just make a boot'n-play variant that
puts all this together into a single image, let the rPi crowd have it (i.e.
mass syndication at personal, inexpensive scale), and we can be done with the
The Problem™ forever...

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rodorgas
Why choose SMS today given it’s message length limitations? Also there’s the
lack of security: SMS isn’t encrypted and can be sniffed. It’s expensive,
while other modern messaging alternatives doesn’t charge by message.

~~~
jraph
No need for data connection, which can be (more) expensive and energy
intensive. The phone can be in deep sleep, consuming nothing, and yet deliver
texts in a timely manner. Sometimes in bad network conditions, texts work
while calls and data fail.

Some pitfalls are reliability and lack of encryption and usually requiring a
phone (which almost requires running non free today in practice, and having an
entity knowing your position at all time and exposition to electromagnetic
waves)

In France texts are usually unlimited in any offer, starting at 2€

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yaleman
Now all they need is a mobile IRC interface to close the loop? :)

~~~
kuschku
So, Quassel and Quasseldroid? (e.g. the new beta of
[https://quasseldroid.info/](https://quasseldroid.info/), requires the new
beta of Quassel, both are expected to be released in the next week, only minor
bugfixes pending)?

Or Weechat + Weechat Android?

Or IRCCloud?

Mobile IRC can be an amazing experience, if done right. Now we need to make
sure it becomes more accessible.

Disclaimer: Quasseldroid author

~~~
hug
If only there were a good iOS quassel client. iQuassel is hot garbage.
Quassel-webserver would be okay, if only iOS didn’t immediately reload PWAs
when you reopened them.

~~~
kuschku
Some people have offered donating me an iPhone so I can build a proper iOS
quassel client.

Once the Quasseldroid beta is released, I'll start working on that.

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CraneWorm
I hope that the numbers are fake.

~~~
woodruffw
The central office code "555" indicates fake numbers under the NANP[1].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_\(telephone_number\))

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koyao
I'd replace the whole thing with Slack :)

~~~
driminicus
I bridge SMS to matrix, I currently have no use for slack, but if I were
forced to use it I would bridge that to matrix as well.

Of course the matrix IRC bridges are also quite good. I'm in a couple of
bridged IRC rooms.

~~~
mindB
What do you use to bridge sms to matrix? I've seen a couple projects people
were working on, but some were very hacky, and the rest were lacking features.

~~~
driminicus
I use the one by tijder:
[https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix](https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix)

It works well enough for me, though I don't use SMS too often though.

What I did like is that I can add another account to a room such that I can
monitor texts from both matrix accounts.

