Hello,

I work for a large ASP, and we are considering adding an option to allow SMS alerts to our users on a potentially daily basis.

We were planning on doing this via email to the carrier sms gateways.

This is a large service and could generate 100,000's of sms messages per day to carriers in the USA alone.

One concern is obviously that we do not want to appear as a spammer and get blacklisted once this service goes live.

Does anyone have any experience in doing this? Do we need to get an agreement with the carriers first? & if so how does one go about it.

I've tried making calls & doing research on the major ones (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint) & have not been able to find out any information about what is acceptable & how to get on a 'whilelist' or enter into a contract for bulk sending.

Any info would be appreciated. Thanks

Sorry I don't have a 'real' answer, but at Modwest we use Verizon cellphones/sms for our small operations staff, and when Nagios detects multiple failures, and they persist so that escalation goes to everyone, even that modest send can exceed tolerable connection rates to vtext.com (Verizon's email-to-sms domain), and we have seen alerts deferred/delayed as a result.

The best way to do this without incurring the possibility of being a blacklisted user is to use a protocol other than e-mail. SMPP is a favorite, SNPP is often also accepted. They are trickier to get going, and large carriers are a lot more work in terms of getting connected up, but they can handle high volume traffic, and typically are faster delivery methods than e-mail.

Many small carriers will be willing to allow you to connect without too much hassle if they have users who want to use your service.

One caveat to this service is that you need to be able to match a user to the correct SMPP link as SMPP is a persistent TCP based connection. A simple DB of carriers would suffice. You would need to talk to carriers on a carrier by carrier basis to establish this type of thing. Alternatively, if your budget allows for it, you can buy service with an aggregate shortcode company. This would allow you to have a single delivery point and they would handle the routing.

Thanks for the info.

So if I set up an SMPP distribution server, would I have to contact each carrier and set up access to an SMPP gateway?

Yes, that is correct. Each carrier has one or more smpp gateways. If you have an SMPP client to connect to their gateways you would need individual connects to each one. An aggregator gets around this, but is spendy.