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Not sure if this is the right section, feel free to move it if it needs to be moved.

I'm researching what's required to be able to have a process where a large institution like a college can have the faculty send/recieve emails/sms messages from students.

Ie, a prof might want to send an update (email/sms) to 500 students in here intro math classes. Or the students might have created study groups, and then want to be able to send msgs to the group members...

We're envisioning a frontend, where the user/prof can send out the email/msgs and the "box" would then handle the processesing and sending/managing/recieving of all the traffic.

So, what's the "box" called, what kind of software tech? It appears that the messaging servers that I've researched would handle this, but I'm not certain.

Thanks

MadHatter
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tom smith
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5 Answers5

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You're looking for a simple email server and a email-to-SMS gateway. The email server can be whatever kind of email server you're comfortable with. It doesn't need to be anything special.

The email-to-SMS gateway can be a product you buy in and run locally, a service you can sign up to, or whatever. There's nothing very exotic about this from your point of view, you're just sending an email to the gateway service containing the phone number of the person you want to send a SMS message to plus the contents of that message. Obviously, if you want to operate a local server then you'll need to provide connectivity onto your country's mobile network.

For example, colleges and universities here in the UK can use this service provided by the JANET academic network. The prime advantage of a service like this is that the service provider is buying service in bulk for all its customers, so you hopefully end up paying less per message than you would with an in house solution (especially when you've factored cost of hardware, support, etc).

To handle sending to groups of students, etc. is simply a matter of distribution lists - pretty much all the gateways I've seen can cope with this, though the 'how' is a detail you should consider carefully.

Rob Moir
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Other folks had suggested few solutions focused on email sending, I will give you a clue regarding sms messaging:

  • use a ready Sms Gateway Device with a web-interface. This kind of device is put on your local network and can be accessed by your users (professors) with a web browser. Inside you could define groups of students (groups can be public - available to all users (professors) or private - available to a single user (professor) ).

An example of such a device is SMSEagle

  • use some software that manages your emails/groups/users. Integrate that software with email2sms gateway or make use of API (most often HTTP) of a sms gateway. In this solution you get both email and sms sent in one click. As about sms gateway for that you can go for online sms gateways like Clickatell (with per sms costs) or again use hardware sms gateway (cost per device).

  • consider volume of sent sms messages per day/hour. It could help you make a decission.

Radoslaw
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Just to give you yet another perspective. There are many cloud services that do bulk email and SMS broadcast. They all normally have API to push your data into. In Anturis we use Mailchimp for emails and BulkSMS for SMS as well as several other providers (for redundancy).

Meriadoc Brandybuck
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I would use a simple mailserver as backend and custom processing scripts (or custom server plugins) to forward mails as sms and vice versa, maybe in combination with a mailing list application for group messages.

In most Linux distributions its actually possible to assign an mailalias to a script and let everything send to that address be processed by the script.

Users can use their own, well known eMailclient to send notifications means no additional training. It should also be fairly simple to adept an mail webclient to your needs.

LordOfTheRats
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Not exactly what you are asking, but I believe one of the many Course Management Systems (CMS, but that 3-letter acronym has several uses) is the solution to your underlying problem. We use Moodle, reputed to be the most popular one. It is avaliable as a package for many Linux distributions.

vonbrand
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