Sending e-mail alert SMS messages with Ozeki NG SMS Gateway
In Ozeki NG SMS Gateway there is a feature to send alert SMS messages for e-mail
recipients when they recieve e-mails. The following guide demonstrates how you
can configure Ozeki NG SMS Gateway to use this feature.
The first step to allow Ozeki NG SMS Gateway to send alert SMS messages is to
configure e-mail forwarding in the Edit/Server preferences menu, under
the e-mail forwarding tab (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Configuring e-mail forwarding
You must check the Enable E-mail to SMS forwarding checkbox, to have the
feature enabled. In the section below that you can configure the DNS hostname
that points to the IP address of the actual SMS gateway, and the SMTP port of the built in SMTP server.
Under that section, you can check the Require SMTP authentication checkbox
- by default, SMTP messages recieved by the SMTP server are passed through the admin user.
If you require SMTP authentication, you can change this by requiring the user's
username and password for which you want to pass the SMTP message -
in this case, you will have to type in the username and password
in the client you will use for sending SMTP messages.
You can also configure which part of the e-mail you want to forward.
You can forward the e-mail subject and body, or only the subject or body.
You can also limit the forwarded SMS messages' length - you can use greater
numbers than 160, but note that in this case, sent messages will be split and sent in several parts -
the client will reassamble the messages from those parts.
Configuring outbound routes
To have this feature working correctly, you must set up appropriate outgoing routes.
Note, that we do not want to forward e-mail messages - we want to send alerts about recieving them.
First, you need to add a route. You can choose the route name yourself. The source
must be the user whose e-mails will be forwarded, and the destination must be the service
provider you want to use for sending the SMS messages. In this case, we do not want to forward e-mail messages,
we only need to send an alert message about recieving one. To do so, you need to
fill in the keyword field too, with an appropriate regular expression (Figure 2).
Figure 2 - An outgoing route for e-mail alerts
The above regular expression is:
s/^(.*)$/You just recieved a message!/
This will change the SMS message's text to "You just recieved a message!" - this
message will be passed to the service provider. That is because the regular expression
matches all kind of messages.
You can append the recieved e-mail's subject by using this regular expression:
s/^(.*)$/You just recieved a message with the subject: $1/
To have this second example working correctly, you must configure e-mail forwarding
to forward the e-mails' subject only (see Figure 1 and description above).
If you configured everything according to the above guide, you can test the feature. I used
Microsoft Outlook to send an e-mail about a forthcoming meeting (Figure 3).
Figure 3 - Sending an e-mail with Microsoft Outlook
My route is configured with the 2nd regex above (s/^(.*)$/You just recieved a message with the subject: $1/),
so I want to send an e-mail alert SMS containing the
e-mail subject. In the e-mail forwarding preferences, i configured Ozeki NG SMS Gateway to forward
e-mail subjects only (see Figure 1 and description above). I use the 'SMPP0' service provider to
send SMS alerts coming from my user, 'john' (Figure 4).
Figure 4 - Outgoing route configured with the appropriate regex
After sending the e-mail, if the service provider could send the alert SMS successfully, you will
see the following in the service provider's log:
2022.02.01. 8:47:35 - INFO 3322: Sending message (try 1/1) john;SMS:TEXT;
8676593d-de95-480d-9e5a-eecf1559d5e7;john;+36201234567;You just recieved a message with
the subject: meeting;using service provider connection 'SMPP0(SMPP0)'
2022.02.01. 8:47:35 - INFO 3327: Message successfully sent. Reference: 1A8F164
