[OPLINTECH] Upcoming SMS Gateway Modification

[Karl Jendretzky]

All,

Late next week I'm planning on making a small change to how the SMS gateway handles mail it receives. 

Currently it looks for a pair of *** to mark the beginning and end of what you want to be the body of your text message. If no occurrences of *** are found, then it just takes the first 160 characters of the mail. 

Most everyone is using the *** method, so the majority of messages that fall into the 2nd category are ones that the library didn't really intend to go out via sms anyways. These messages are usually pretty ugly, and I'm sure you'd prefer the patron not receive them.

The planned change is to have the gateway simply discard any messages that it can't find a pair of *** in.

In the meantime I've setup a catch that will send me a copy of any email that would be discarded under the new proposed functionality. This will allow me to contact any library that will need to tweak their valid messages before the change is made.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Karl Jendretzky
Technology Manager
Ohio Public Library Information Network
jendreka at oplin.org
(614) 728-1515