Many of Peter's requests are not fulfilled with the current SMS packages.
This is a description of his problems and how he has solved them:
I don´t like having to pay a per message fee to get a message across to friends
and colleagues.
I don´t like paying extra-ordinary roaming charges when outside my native Sweden.
I would like to have the same control over my SMS messages as I have of my e-mail. In fact, I would like to have inbox rules, automatic forwarding and
the ability to write macros to handle my SMS messages.
In addition to all that I would also love to be able to type the messages on any
device, not just the one that currently has my SIM card in it.
Sounds like a rather tall order? Well,
Peter has actually done all that
for himself, after having failed to find packaged service (in Sweden) for it. Actually no packaged service even comes close to offering all that!
We are
quite far from being able to give this as a packaged service for mass
consumption, but we will share some notes on how Peter did it:
Signed up for a SIM card with a local provider with a reasonable SMS plan.
Bought a USB Broadband modem and an SMS
ActiveX-control that he can script against.
Signed up for a Windows Live account.
Put the SIM-card in a USB-modem and installed that modem into a computer that is always on.
Installed Outlook 2010 and the ActiveX-control on that
computer.
Wrote some 50 lines of VBA script to handle both outgoing
and incoming SMS messages.
