Can someone please explain the difference between using an SMS module versus sending SMS through email (email-to-text)?
I don’t know what features the SMS module adds that can’t be achieved by email-to-text.
Thanks!
If email-to-SMS reliably works for all of your users then the biggest advantage to the SMS module would be support for acknowledgement.
It’s not uncommon for carrier support for email-to-SMS to be poor or non-existent though.
Yea, that's what I'm worried about. I'm going to try out email-to-SMS for alerts. Our customer wants only critical alarms on SMS. That's a small amount of them so I'll try out email-to-SMS and see if it works. If not, it's great that a solution exists already.
Thanks!
There is one other thing that the customer may wish to consider: Not every employee may have a phone plan that includes ‘unlimited free Internet browsing’, compared to ‘free unlimited voice and text’. This means that if the employee is not at a laptop with Internet access, yet rather at a telephone with only voice and ‘text’ access- they could miss a ‘text’ message. That is because what the telephone providers such as AT & T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint ( and a host of those who resell services, eg. Cricket, Consumer Cellular, etc. ) call ‘text’ is not e-mail through a web browser. Your geographic area and providers may vary; yet realize that some resellers ( eg. Tracfone ) are not always going to tell their customers the difference until the account has been in use for a few months. By that time, the customer may be less inclined to go elsewhere.