Message types

What kind of message types can be sent as SMS?

There are several text based and binary message types in the SMS technology.

The most common message type is a standard text message, that is less then 160 characters and that uses the 7 bit GSM alphabet. If you want to send a message longer then 160 characters, you will send a multipart SMS. A message containing international characters, is called a unicode SMS. A unicode SMS message can contain 70 characters. If you want to send a unicode message longer then 70 characters, you will send a multipart unicode SMS message. Text messages can also have attributes. These attributes can make the message display immediately when it arrives (FLASH sms), or they can turn on small icons on the cellphone (e.g.: voice mail indication).

Binary messages can carry mobile phone configuration information and mobile content. For example a ringtone, a wallpaper or WAP browser settings can be sent as SMS. For a complete list of SMS message types, please visit the SMS Message Type page.

What are long (multipart) SMS messages, and how are they handled?

Multipart messages are used if long text is sent through the network. In this case text is split into several SMS messages, during the delivery.

When you send a long message the sending mobile phone splits the message into segments, and sends it through the mobile network. The recipient phone reassembles the segments and displays the text to the user when all message parts arrive. This means a multipart SMS is message takes several SMS-es to go through the mobile network, meaning it costs more.

Ozeki NG SMS Gateway handles multipart messages properly. It does the segmentation when necessary for outgoing messages and it performs the reassembly for incoming multipart SMS-es.

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If you are insterested in how to setup automated SMS notifications, you should apply one of the following configurations:

SMS through HTTP requests
SMS from E-mail
SMS from the command line
SMS using txt files


If you are a software developer you can proceed to adding SMS functionality to your source code by clicking on one of the following links:

PHP SMS example
C# SMS example
ASP SMS example
SQL SMS example
Delphi SMS example

If you would like to send and receive SMS messages from MS Office applications, please check out the following links:

Send SMS from MS Excel
Send SMS from MS Outlook
Check out Ozeki SMS Client

Next:2.4 Message routing |2.6 Delivery reports