mms2sms - an MMS to SMS Gateway

Overview
========

mms2sms lets you use your phone's MMS client to send normal SMS messages 
via a custom MMS gateway. The gateway will extract the text component of 
a single page MMS message, and send it as a plain text SMS message to the 
recipient you specified in the MMS message. It uses the bulksms.co.uk
HTTP-based SMS gateway service for this, at an approximate cost of 4 
Eurocents per message. You ca, of course,  easily modify the code in 
index.php to use a different SMS gateway service.

Why?
====

Sending SMS messages to phones on other networks can be expensive. For 
example I pay 25 pence or 30 Eurocents to send SMS messages abroad. This 
method will let you use your phone in combination with Internet-based SMS 
services to send SMS messages from anywere to any network worldwide for 
around 4 or 5 Eurocents. Basically, mms2sms is for sending international
SMS messages from your phone at low cost.

Installation
============

1. Unzip and untar the mms2sms.tar.gz file into a directory on your web 
   server.
 
2. Get an account at bulksms.co.uk and buy some credits. This will let 
   you specify your "sender" address (specify it to be your mobile phone 
   number, as by default it will be "Bulksms.co.uk"). As mentioned above,
   you can use an SMS provider of your choice, but the code works with 
   bulksms.co.uk out of the box.

3. Edit the three configuration lines in mms2sms/index.php, supplying 
   your bulksms.co.uk username and password, and a directory for logging
   (leave blank for no logging). The permissions for the directory must 
   allow the httpd user to write to the directory. Note that by default,
   the log directory is a subdirectory of mms2sms - which means it is
   accessible to arbitrary users via your web server. For privacy, you
   should probably move the log directory out of the web directory tree.

Phone Configuration
===================

IMPORTANT: You should keep a record of your original MMS settings on your
phone before changing anything, as these new settings will not allow you 
to pick up MMS messages destined for your phone, and will not allow you to 
send normal MMS messages to anyone. You should take particular note of:

a) the service centre address ( http://mms.orange.co.uk in my case )
b) the WAP Account ( Orange MMS in my case )

1. Change the service centre address to the URL where you installed 
   mms2sms. For example:

	http://www.myserver.com/mms2sms/

2. Change the WAP Account to whichever WAP or GPRS account you use to 
   browse the web on your phone. This is usually necessary because the 
   default WAP account for MMS access will probably not let you connect
   to your custom MMS gateway running on your server, but will typically
   only let you connect to your operator's official MMS gateway.

Charges
=======

a) You will be charged roughly 4 Eurocents per message you send by 
   bulksms.co.uk. You may find cheaper and equally reliable web-based
   SMS Gateways - if so, let me know. You need to buy credits in blocks
   from bulksms.co.uk, with a minimum spend of the equivalent of around
   15 Euros.

b) You will probably be charged GPRS or WAP usage rates by your operator 
   each time you send an "MMS" to your custom gateway. The amount of data
   sent is very low, however - only a couple of kilobytes in each case - 
   so the cost is going to be around 0.1 to 0.5 Eurocents for most users.

Security
========

There isn't any. Anyone who configures their device to use your URL as 
an MMS gateway will be able to send messages for free (as you'll be paying 
for them). You could try restricting access to the script to the IP 
address of the WAP gateway through which your device connets, but this 
would only limit access to your existing operator's users. You might 
insert a "password" in the text of the message, and check for that - but 
anyone monitoring your traffic could see that too. Still, it's probably
worth doing.

Tam Freestone-Bayes
http://tamagen.com/mms2sms/
December 2004