quote:
Originally posted by cRuNcHeR
I think i understand what you're both saying but i've even sent SMS messages to myself and people in Canada and they read them free of charge. Just a small advert on the text, E.g:
Admin@Text4free.net <message here> sent from text4free
Or something similar atleast.
I'm really in dissbelief of what you say about the costs and having to reply to view the message so I'll tell you step by step how i would send a message from text4free;
As I said it depends on the provider.
As a matter of fact, Text4Free even clearly states it on their site that they use other services and don't send the SMS themselfs and that the recipient might need to pay (a rediculus amount) for the SMS depending on the provider.
quote:
Originally posted by cRuNcHeR
Again i'll mention; The top few listings for the 'Provider' being 'Any <country> Provider' are the only ones that don't work for me (maybe thats what you guys are talking about?). I make sure i know the contacts real provider and select it individually.
There is no difference between the two for some of them. The
'Any <country> Provider' and the individual listings use the exact same services (and thus the exact same conditions in terms of payment, ads, whatever) for some countries.
However, the individual listing sometimes do use other services especially pointed towards that individual provider (sometimes using the provider's own online service). That is the difference, if there is any...
Again, there is no point in stating that the
'Any <country> Provider' "fail pretty bad" since everything related to SMS depends on the provider of the phone number. For some providers the individual listings
"fail pretty bad", for others its the
'Any <country> Provider' listings. There is no right or wrong and no always 100% working one. And so there is no better or worse online SMS service and Text4Free is no better than any of the other 1001 online SMS services.
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All these things can be find out if you read the terms and usage and do some of your own digging into what exact services Text4Free uses and if you look at the pages of those other services, etc... You need to look at the sources of the pages to find out of those services work and if they use other online services, etc...
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The bottom line is that every online SMS service works roughly in the same way. There is no 'magic' or 'ultimate' service which works 100% all the time for everybody. It might work for you, but it might fail for 90% of the other people.
As such, it is not very usefull to start discussing how individual services work, especially not in a thread which was actually about how you can send an SMS to yourself to notify you if someone came online or not.
If you wish to discuss individual services it can be better done in the subforum TechTalk.
And as such, making a public script for this which works 100% all the time is going to be very difficult if not impossible. Proof is all over the place, each and every such script works for some, but doesn't for others, and/or limited to only a few providers, and/or might suffer from other disadvantages (depending on the phone number providers you're goint to use it for*).
* For example: since I don't wanna pay €2 just to read a test SMS, the services used by Text4Free to send a SMS to my phone number do not allow any other SMS to be send to my phone; I first need to read/reply to the test SMS I've send before, before another SMS can be send to my phone from that service, and since I don't wanna pay €2, nobody will be able to send me any SMS using Text4Free....
* And something else very important: there is no (!) way to determine the provider by simply looking at the phone number! Because in many countries you can change providers but keeping your phone number. And since you must know the provider for most (free) online SMS services, you either need to ask your contact what provider he uses, or you must use an online SMS service where you don't need to provide the provider (and those services, the proper ones, are never free).
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