[Evergreen-general] SMS Messages Not Being Received

[Kev Woolley]

When Rogers and Fido went offline, I tracked down the company responsible to see if they were still in business. They were, but without giving too many details, informed me that the relationship with the carriers was severed in a way that was astoundingly negative, with no notice being given. (They didn't specify who was "at fault", nor did I ask.)

In my experience, the (Canadian, at least) carriers did/do not care about or acknowledge spam sent through SMS gateways. The usual path down the yellow brick road is to hear from them "there's no such thing as an email to SMS gateway", then when shown that there is, "the email to SMS gateway is built into our systems and cannot be changed, disabled, or spam-controlled in any way", then things eventually progress to "I'll talk to the appropriate people to have them disable it for your accounts". I think this jarring drop of a service is par for course for our carriers, unfortunately.

Paid services would seem to be the way to go for getting the most messages through to patrons, but it's probably long past time to start looking for alternatives to SMS. (It would surprise me if SMS is still common in ten years. Both handset/OS manufacturers and carriers have been trying to put SMS/MMS on the short end of the stick for at least the last ten years, and there is no corresponding push in the opposite direction, so that's where things are heading.) Integration with common instant messenger systems is an obvious replacement, but comes with its own set of problems (such as the data collection by the instant messenger system provider, which in many cases is also the handset/OS manufacturer (iMessage, and whatever they're calling Google Chat these days). I'm not too sure how that would fly under FOIPPA, PIPEDA, and related legislation. I don't know if the encrypted messenger services have enough market share to support specifically.

Is there interest in putting together a working group to investigate ways forward? I would be happy to organise, at least initially.

Thank you,

Kev

-- 
Kev Woolley (they/them)

Gratefully acknowledging that I live and work in the unceded traditional 
territories of the Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw.



________________________________________
From: Evergreen-general <evergreen-general-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org> on behalf of Rogan Hamby via Evergreen-general <evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Sent: 05 April 2024 11:41
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Cc: Rogan Hamby
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-general] SMS Messages Not Being Received

This is an ongoing trend I've been seeing with SMS Gateways. A charitable interpretation would be that they are doing it to prevent spam but regardless of motive it is certainly driving people to look at SMS services that don't rely on gateways. This has been a topic of conversation in the Koha community as well.
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