TUTORIAL BulkVS SMS Reception/Transmission Gateway - php code

[Halea]

I have modified the script to support MMS
...

Good job @rob92 !
My business and I always used sms for really short, quick messages. For anything more traditional emailing with (often encrypted) attachments has been our standard. So, I never needed to implement MMS support. But I am glad you did.
I'll give a try and see if it can help our workflow.

 

[rob92]

My main motivation is that when testing MMS the message text field was blank and it was actually attached as a .txt file.

Also I added the CharSet = "UTF-8" to properly handle emojis, they were coming through as garbled text with the original code.

I'm also not entirely sure urldecode($data->Message) is needed, then again I'm not a developer. I'm also not entirely sure any of this code is safe... it could be vulnerable to code injection attacks.

You will need to add PHPMailer to the correct path. I tested IIRC with an old version 5.5

 

[smurfturf]

@rob92 I was able to do some initial testing with your revised code and it looks like it works well with my deployment. I really appreciate you sharing!

 

[rob92]

I found an issue with MMS not sending when the message body is blank. I have one fix working but it's not as elegant as I would like so I need to dig into PHPMailer docs to see if there's another solution. Might as well through in a newer version since the one I used is likely obsolete.

 

[rob92]

Here's my updated version.

• Bundled all required files
• MMS without text are working
• Tested with PHPMailer 6.5.3 (Nov 2021)
• If email fails to send it will not transmit OK to BulkVS, although they don't seem to have a retry queue
• It will not attempt to send an email if expected values aren't received
• Added values to send email through Gmail (untested)

You can check your Apache error log for a 500 error on sms-rx.php

/edit Feb 17th: Added PHPMailer license

 

[KNERD]

With companies just now freely turning SMS/MMS over to the government just for the asking, I would certainly be telling people to stop using it.

 

[Hometech]

I am thinking I need to modify the mediaURLs below to get MMS to work? I guess I could use the pbx in some folder?


"Message": "",
"MediaURLs": [
"https://s3.aws.com/file1.smil",
"https://s3.aws.com/file2.jpg",
"https://s3.aws.com/file3.txt"

 

[rob92]

No, that is just a sample of the message BulkVS sends. The actual MMS will have a live URL with any media/attachment sent with the message. If you go to your portal Messaging > Messaging Instructions > Inbound MMS it will show the same example.

If you look at lines 106-138 of my script that's where it downloads the MediaURLs and attaches them to the email.

 

[krzykat]

Are you able to send messages now with BulkVS or do they now require a campaign to send out messages?

 

[phinphan]

Are you able to send messages now with BulkVS or do they now require a campaign to send out messages?

My messaging works great with bulkvs. I did the registration they asked for and virtually all my texts go through. I use textable as the front end and it works well.

 

[chessmaster]

Are you able to send messages now with BulkVS or do they now require a campaign to send out messages?

No. My outbound messages stopped in the middle of February. I found 1 "failed" message in the log, now they are just ignored with no error message of any kind. I emailed them and they said you need to register (and pay the fees) for OUTBOUND texting. Inbound works fine though, for what that's worth......

 

[atsak]

This worked great just now for receiving SMS. I really needed a fast solution for bulkvs to receive SMS on a couple of my DID's - I dropped the sms-rx code into my web server (I don't expose my PBX to the web) in a subfolder, setup the hook at BulkVS, edited the .php with my email addresses and voila. Took less than 10 minutes. I really don't need send but I could set it up later I suppose if I need to.

Thanks much for this. Super helpful given my PBX's are older versions.