6 ms·

Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

158 points by dnate 8y ago

smcl 8y ago
It’s also possible to do this by sending AT commands via serial - I wrote some python scripts to do so on my Thinkpad: http://blog.mclemon.io/thinkpad-x250-sms-and-gps-via-python http://blog.mclemon.io/thinkpad-x250-sms-and-gps-via-python
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I seem to recall that Openmoko was built this way.
songzme 8y ago
Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions: How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-blocks/ https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc... I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers from sipTrunk, I wouldn't know how to connect it to sim cards.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I don't know either, but suspect that something like this is involved: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/128-Slots-SIMBANK-remote-sim-card_1925600573.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/128-Slots-SIMBANK-rem... Edit: Or https://www.qosmotec.com/ireg-test-automation-remote-ues-central-sims/ https://www.qosmotec.com/ireg-test-automation-remote-ues-cen...
- pixelN 8y ago
  this might be interesting for you: https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >"JMP gives you a Canadian or US phone number that is yours to keep. JMP allows you to send and receive text messages and picture messages using your Jabber client, with calls delivered to voicemail (including a text transcription) by default. "
- techsupporter 8y ago
  Depending on what you want your project to do, you don't need to connect a phone number to a SIM card. Twilio does that for you, letting you use their API to send and receive SMS (text) messages with other phone numbers. It's the recipient's phone number, not your Twilio one, that's connected to a SIM card. What the linked post here talks about is using a device that's basically a mobile phone in a USB stick form factor to send and receive SMS like you'd do on a mobile phone. You buy a SIM, insert it into the device, and start texting. That's the other side of what your Twilio project would do.
  - songzme 8y ago
    Oops I reread my statement and I think I miscommunicated. I meant I'm trying to figure out how I might build Twilio (the product). OP's article shows how to send/receive texts (check). I don't know how Twilio buys numbers, and how I might build a service that buys numbers for people.
- pjc50 8y ago
  https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html ?
Symbiote 8y ago
I've inherited (then reinstalled) a monitoring system using SMS Tools. The modem has a long USB cable, and an external antenna. I positioned the antenna on top of the rack. It's in the middle of the ground/machine floor of a large building, so there's a lot of thick concrete walls around, but it gets a good signal and reliably sends SMS alerts to me.
pmlnr 8y ago
gammu-smsd looks simpler to me.
babayega2 8y ago
The same project using an SMS modem , kannel and Django https://hackernoon.com/build-an-sms-center-with-python-kannel-and-a-gsm-modem-9c0d29560d82 https://hackernoon.com/build-an-sms-center-with-python-kanne... Edit: and a repository of modems that can send SMS on Linux is here :P https://wammu.eu/phones/ https://wammu.eu/phones/
hardwaresofton 8y ago
I've long suspected that the only way to make an actually private/secure cellular phone is by bypassing 3G all-together and making it optional -- forcing the SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware that had very limited integration with the phone itself (essentially as dangerous as any external USB device would be)? Most smart phones are considered pwned-by-default due to the inclusion of the 3G/4G/whatever chip you have no control over. Of course, there's the whole issue of distributed trust by way of pre-loaded X509 certs but there are some relatively secure ways around that (keybase, meeting in person and swapping PGP keys, etc) that would move the goalpost far enough to where it might not even matter any more. Does anyone know anything that's close to this? basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity?
- confounded 8y ago
  > SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware... basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity? Not exactly what you’re after, but the Librem 5 (crowd-funded, at the head-scratching stage) aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. On a device that runs Debian. From following progress on that project I’ve got the impression that everything to do with chips for mobile connectivity are so patent/IP-law encumbered that there’s little hope for Free Software replacements. https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ However, hacking on that handset is the best chance I’m aware of for you getting the device you want (perhaps with something else in the M2 slot).
  - znpy 8y ago
    > but the Librem 5 aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. If that comes true I am definitely getting one.
  - subway 8y ago
    I think only the prototypes are using M2. The production devices likely won't have a removable modem, but it will still be a separate chip with separately controllable power.
  - 8y ago
mateuszf 8y ago
For personal usage: if you have an Android phone and are not bothered by web ui, you can use https://messages.android.com/ https://messages.android.com/
- gh02t 8y ago
  Side note, is it just me, or is the Android Messages app really laggy? Especially on the phone, there is a significant delay from when I hit send to the message popping up on screen, to the point that I frequently get the "Messages has stopped working, would you like to stop it" dialog. It has been slowly getting better, but it's still surprising in such a high-profile app so I'm wondering if it's something specific to me. That said, I recently switched to AM from Pulse (which also has a webui). I quite liked Pulse, but the web interface had a lot of trouble staying in sync, plus it requires a subscription to use the web interface. Also tried MightyText, but $7/mo is ridiculous and it also had sync issues. Android Messages seems to have really nailed sync across several devices, which is pretty important to me.
  - mateuszf 8y ago
    It's pretty slow for me too, but I don't mind.
  - bradstewart 8y ago
    I have the exact same issue (on a Pixel 2 XL). It started a few months ago, and has been getting progressively worse.
magnat 8y ago
> So, we got hold of a USB GSM modem and used a prepaid phone SIM. This allowed us to receive unlimited messages for free. Keep in mind it is common (at least in EU) for mobile providers to forbid M2M and M2P traffic when using typical customer tariff plan, especially ones with unlimited messages. It's quite easy to detect it and SIM cards used in such way are blocked rather quickly.
- gsich 8y ago
  Read again, it was receiving.
diftraku 8y ago
The first mistake in the article is using smstools. Having personally had to deal with smstools for the past two years, using Gammu SMSD or even a paid SMS Gateway would have been a better choice. Granted, this was on OpenWRT using a frozen version of smstools and largest issues were with trying to get Å, Ä & Ö to work (fun times with UCS-2/UTF-8/WTF-8 and Latin1/CP-1502/ISO-8859-1). It sure was an experience and in the end, the problem was blown away by just using UTF-8 (which had the unfortunate side-effect of doubling the amount of sent messages due to the space taken by the encoding). What puzzles me is how easily large entities go for services that send from a random phone number (for example, VR in Finland sends "mobile train tickets" via random numbers that change with every message) where as some opt to "fake" the from number to have the company/service name.
znpy 8y ago
This was an awesome read. I finally decided to resuscitate my old ThinkPad x200s who had a modem card in it, put SIM card in the spot and do some testing. Sammy/fammi worked after some quarrel with ModemManager (not really it's fault, it was doing his job). By the way this read has resuscitated an old fantasy of mine: adding an indirection layer to my mobile phone presence. After this testing I am finally sure I can leave my SIM card at home and just use a regular internet connection to poll messages from home. My bigger fantasy is to be able to proxy calls too, so that I can finally leave this third-millennium-leash (my phone) at home.
- rohit2412 8y ago
  Just buy Google fi, and access/dial your phone calls/sms in hangouts.
  - znpy 8y ago
    > Just buy Google fi, and access/dial your phone calls/sms in hangouts. Please, tie yourself to Google a bit more. FTFY.
  - kilroy123 8y ago
    Don't even need google fi. I ported my number to google voice and I can send texts from my the web app. In fact, I mostly just text from my computer instead of picking up my phone and texting from there.
- ossguy 8y ago
  You could add this indirection layer with something like JMP instead. With https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ you don't need a SIM card at all - you just login to your phone number with an XMPP client (SMS/MMS) or SIP client (voice) and use it wherever you have an Internet connection. If you only want to use it at home, you can just use wifi and don't need to pay any cell carrier. But if you do want access to your number away from wifi, you can get a cheap data-only plan and use XMPP/SIP clients on your phone too. It's always up to you if you want to be tracked - you can turn off your phone('s modem) and use your number only over wifi whenever you like. And it's easy to transfer your existing number into JMP - see https://jmp.chat/#existing https://jmp.chat/#existing for details.
pknopf 8y ago
Is it possible to write an Android/OS app that has full control over SMS, and have that app connect (as a "node") to a central server for sending/receiving messages? Then, if you need more throughput, just turn on some more phones?
spoiledtechie 8y ago
You don't need any of this stuff. It might be technically cool to do SMS now, but there is an android app for SMS Gateways. Just have an extra phone that sits around and sends SMS all day long. Much cheaper than Twilio if your sending large amounts of text messages.
walrus01 8y ago
Before anyone thinks of implementing this for large-scale notifications/outbound SMS with one SIM card and an "unlimited" SMS plan for $40/mo, be aware that your cellular carrier will rate limit or cut you off completely pretty quickly if you use it for bulk SMS. There's a reason why various VoIP providers have APIs and bulk SMS rate pricing.
arendtio 8y ago
Btw. if its just about replying to an SMS manually, tools like kdeconnect [1] can be handy which allow you to write SMS messages on your desktop and send them via your smartphone. [1]: https://albertvaka.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/kde-connect-1-0-is-here/ https://albertvaka.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/kde-connect-1-0-...
- flak48 8y ago
  I worked on adding SMS support through 3g sticks for KDE too, using KDE IM/Telepathy a while ago. Fun times. https://hashpling.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/sms-messaging-with-telepathy-gsoc-update/ https://hashpling.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/sms-messaging-wit...
syntaxing 8y ago
Is there a way to something similar to this but for MMS?
ebrinkster 8y ago
Great project, definitely going to do this. I've been wanting a setup like this to use with the Gnokii(1) toolkit for sending SMS class 0 messages. Maybe this toolkit can do this as well. Curious if anyone else here has tried this as well... 1: https://www.gnokii.org/ https://www.gnokii.org/

158 points by dnate 8y ago

smcl 8y ago

It’s also possible to do this by sending AT commands via serial - I wrote some python scripts to do so on my Thinkpad: http://blog.mclemon.io/thinkpad-x250-sms-and-gps-via-python http://blog.mclemon.io/thinkpad-x250-sms-and-gps-via-python

digi_owl 8y ago
I seem to recall that Openmoko was built this way.

songzme 8y ago

Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions: How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-blocks/ https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc... I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers from sipTrunk, I wouldn't know how to connect it to sim cards.

mirimir 8y ago
I don't know either, but suspect that something like this is involved: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/128-Slots-SIMBANK-remote-sim-card_1925600573.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/128-Slots-SIMBANK-rem... Edit: Or https://www.qosmotec.com/ireg-test-automation-remote-ues-central-sims/ https://www.qosmotec.com/ireg-test-automation-remote-ues-cen...
pixelN 8y ago
this might be interesting for you: https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >"JMP gives you a Canadian or US phone number that is yours to keep. JMP allows you to send and receive text messages and picture messages using your Jabber client, with calls delivered to voicemail (including a text transcription) by default. "
techsupporter 8y ago
Depending on what you want your project to do, you don't need to connect a phone number to a SIM card. Twilio does that for you, letting you use their API to send and receive SMS (text) messages with other phone numbers. It's the recipient's phone number, not your Twilio one, that's connected to a SIM card. What the linked post here talks about is using a device that's basically a mobile phone in a USB stick form factor to send and receive SMS like you'd do on a mobile phone. You buy a SIM, insert it into the device, and start texting. That's the other side of what your Twilio project would do.
- songzme 8y ago
  Oops I reread my statement and I think I miscommunicated. I meant I'm trying to figure out how I might build Twilio (the product). OP's article shows how to send/receive texts (check). I don't know how Twilio buys numbers, and how I might build a service that buys numbers for people.
pjc50 8y ago
https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html ?

Symbiote 8y ago

I've inherited (then reinstalled) a monitoring system using SMS Tools. The modem has a long USB cable, and an external antenna. I positioned the antenna on top of the rack. It's in the middle of the ground/machine floor of a large building, so there's a lot of thick concrete walls around, but it gets a good signal and reliably sends SMS alerts to me.

pmlnr 8y ago

gammu-smsd looks simpler to me.

babayega2 8y ago

The same project using an SMS modem , kannel and Django https://hackernoon.com/build-an-sms-center-with-python-kannel-and-a-gsm-modem-9c0d29560d82 https://hackernoon.com/build-an-sms-center-with-python-kanne... Edit: and a repository of modems that can send SMS on Linux is here :P https://wammu.eu/phones/ https://wammu.eu/phones/

hardwaresofton 8y ago

I've long suspected that the only way to make an actually private/secure cellular phone is by bypassing 3G all-together and making it optional -- forcing the SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware that had very limited integration with the phone itself (essentially as dangerous as any external USB device would be)? Most smart phones are considered pwned-by-default due to the inclusion of the 3G/4G/whatever chip you have no control over. Of course, there's the whole issue of distributed trust by way of pre-loaded X509 certs but there are some relatively secure ways around that (keybase, meeting in person and swapping PGP keys, etc) that would move the goalpost far enough to where it might not even matter any more. Does anyone know anything that's close to this? basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity?

confounded 8y ago
> SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware... basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity? Not exactly what you’re after, but the Librem 5 (crowd-funded, at the head-scratching stage) aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. On a device that runs Debian. From following progress on that project I’ve got the impression that everything to do with chips for mobile connectivity are so patent/IP-law encumbered that there’s little hope for Free Software replacements. https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ However, hacking on that handset is the best chance I’m aware of for you getting the device you want (perhaps with something else in the M2 slot).
- znpy 8y ago
  > but the Librem 5 aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. If that comes true I am definitely getting one.
- subway 8y ago
  I think only the prototypes are using M2. The production devices likely won't have a removable modem, but it will still be a separate chip with separately controllable power.
- 8y ago

mateuszf 8y ago

For personal usage: if you have an Android phone and are not bothered by web ui, you can use https://messages.android.com/ https://messages.android.com/

gh02t 8y ago
Side note, is it just me, or is the Android Messages app really laggy? Especially on the phone, there is a significant delay from when I hit send to the message popping up on screen, to the point that I frequently get the "Messages has stopped working, would you like to stop it" dialog. It has been slowly getting better, but it's still surprising in such a high-profile app so I'm wondering if it's something specific to me. That said, I recently switched to AM from Pulse (which also has a webui). I quite liked Pulse, but the web interface had a lot of trouble staying in sync, plus it requires a subscription to use the web interface. Also tried MightyText, but $7/mo is ridiculous and it also had sync issues. Android Messages seems to have really nailed sync across several devices, which is pretty important to me.
- mateuszf 8y ago
  It's pretty slow for me too, but I don't mind.
- bradstewart 8y ago
  I have the exact same issue (on a Pixel 2 XL). It started a few months ago, and has been getting progressively worse.

magnat 8y ago

> So, we got hold of a USB GSM modem and used a prepaid phone SIM. This allowed us to receive unlimited messages for free. Keep in mind it is common (at least in EU) for mobile providers to forbid M2M and M2P traffic when using typical customer tariff plan, especially ones with unlimited messages. It's quite easy to detect it and SIM cards used in such way are blocked rather quickly.

gsich 8y ago
Read again, it was receiving.

diftraku 8y ago

The first mistake in the article is using smstools. Having personally had to deal with smstools for the past two years, using Gammu SMSD or even a paid SMS Gateway would have been a better choice. Granted, this was on OpenWRT using a frozen version of smstools and largest issues were with trying to get Å, Ä & Ö to work (fun times with UCS-2/UTF-8/WTF-8 and Latin1/CP-1502/ISO-8859-1). It sure was an experience and in the end, the problem was blown away by just using UTF-8 (which had the unfortunate side-effect of doubling the amount of sent messages due to the space taken by the encoding). What puzzles me is how easily large entities go for services that send from a random phone number (for example, VR in Finland sends "mobile train tickets" via random numbers that change with every message) where as some opt to "fake" the from number to have the company/service name.

znpy 8y ago

This was an awesome read. I finally decided to resuscitate my old ThinkPad x200s who had a modem card in it, put SIM card in the spot and do some testing. Sammy/fammi worked after some quarrel with ModemManager (not really it's fault, it was doing his job). By the way this read has resuscitated an old fantasy of mine: adding an indirection layer to my mobile phone presence. After this testing I am finally sure I can leave my SIM card at home and just use a regular internet connection to poll messages from home. My bigger fantasy is to be able to proxy calls too, so that I can finally leave this third-millennium-leash (my phone) at home.

rohit2412 8y ago
Just buy Google fi, and access/dial your phone calls/sms in hangouts.
- znpy 8y ago
  > Just buy Google fi, and access/dial your phone calls/sms in hangouts. Please, tie yourself to Google a bit more. FTFY.
- kilroy123 8y ago
  Don't even need google fi. I ported my number to google voice and I can send texts from my the web app. In fact, I mostly just text from my computer instead of picking up my phone and texting from there.
ossguy 8y ago
You could add this indirection layer with something like JMP instead. With https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ you don't need a SIM card at all - you just login to your phone number with an XMPP client (SMS/MMS) or SIP client (voice) and use it wherever you have an Internet connection. If you only want to use it at home, you can just use wifi and don't need to pay any cell carrier. But if you do want access to your number away from wifi, you can get a cheap data-only plan and use XMPP/SIP clients on your phone too. It's always up to you if you want to be tracked - you can turn off your phone('s modem) and use your number only over wifi whenever you like. And it's easy to transfer your existing number into JMP - see https://jmp.chat/#existing https://jmp.chat/#existing for details.

pknopf 8y ago

Is it possible to write an Android/OS app that has full control over SMS, and have that app connect (as a "node") to a central server for sending/receiving messages? Then, if you need more throughput, just turn on some more phones?

spoiledtechie 8y ago

You don't need any of this stuff. It might be technically cool to do SMS now, but there is an android app for SMS Gateways. Just have an extra phone that sits around and sends SMS all day long. Much cheaper than Twilio if your sending large amounts of text messages.

walrus01 8y ago

Before anyone thinks of implementing this for large-scale notifications/outbound SMS with one SIM card and an "unlimited" SMS plan for $40/mo, be aware that your cellular carrier will rate limit or cut you off completely pretty quickly if you use it for bulk SMS. There's a reason why various VoIP providers have APIs and bulk SMS rate pricing.

arendtio 8y ago

Btw. if its just about replying to an SMS manually, tools like kdeconnect [1] can be handy which allow you to write SMS messages on your desktop and send them via your smartphone. [1]: https://albertvaka.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/kde-connect-1-0-is-here/ https://albertvaka.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/kde-connect-1-0-...

flak48 8y ago
I worked on adding SMS support through 3g sticks for KDE too, using KDE IM/Telepathy a while ago. Fun times. https://hashpling.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/sms-messaging-with-telepathy-gsoc-update/ https://hashpling.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/sms-messaging-wit...

syntaxing 8y ago

Is there a way to something similar to this but for MMS?

ebrinkster 8y ago

Great project, definitely going to do this. I've been wanting a setup like this to use with the Gnokii(1) toolkit for sending SMS class 0 messages. Maybe this toolkit can do this as well. Curious if anyone else here has tried this as well... 1: https://www.gnokii.org/ https://www.gnokii.org/