SMS Through Email

I know this is a subject that has been well covered here and throughout the web, so I am not asking for a list of carrier emails, howeve开发者_如何学Cr my question is how to send a text without knowing the users carrier and preferably without going through a third party.

The only solution that I thought of would be send out to all carriers. I would only be sending to US carriers, however would a large number of failed emails slow the mail server at all or cause any other problems?

Any advice on this solution or thoughts of others would be great.

If you keep sending messages to a carrier to numbers that don't exist, you'll start to get blocked as a spammer. Probably best to either ask your users for which carrier they use or use a gateway like Twilio (where I work) or the various others out there.

I would recommend using CloudVox's digits API. The carrier's aren't always up to date, from what I can tell it basically relies on the original carrier you got your phone number from. i.e. You had verizon but switched to AT&T to get an iPhone and kept the same phone number, CloudVox API would likely tell you the number is still a verizon number. However, I used this for my existing user's and then exposed a select box for them to choose their provider.

http://digits.cloudvox.com/

If you have a reason to consider using a third-party API provider, I'd recommend Plivo (I work here), among many other providers, to bypass the carrier lookup issue and have more flexibility.

It will require some extra legwork than sending to carrier emails, but you will less likely to fret over the deliverability. For example, check out the email and sms gateway built using Plivo and Mailgun API.