Edited please see my next post.

AN UNEDITED REPLY I JUST MADE ON VBULLETIN.ORG it has a few adjustments to what I already stated in my last posts all technical details come from the clickatell api and could vary if another provider was used.



I very much doubt a free sms provider would allow you to do this or provide an api for you.

If you are willing to pay for the SMS messages then a service such as http://www.clickatell.com could easily be used (download their api and you will see how easy it is) of course there are many others as well.

As stated on my post in the vbhacks site for them to be able to reply you would need to have the 2 way facility (so when they reply the reply gets sent to a php script) the prices on clickatell do not state how much this costs but instead ask you to contact them to ask for details (presumably also to find out how many you estimate you will need)

Another problem is the maximum limit on characters allowed in an sms message what I said on vbhacks seems to be slightly inaccurate (I said 72 characters was the max) it is in fact

basically if the max characters are exceeded then it splits them up into multiple messages (depending on how you have it set)

the amount of characters is not changeable as I beleive they have chosen an amount that works with most networks.

REGARDING

this is easy enough it can be set to show when the message has been sent, when the network has received the message or when the message is received by the mobile.

it would be a very bad idea to have it set to have it hold on for a response as if there is a delay then the script would time out and I very much doubt a user would wait to see, for example if someone had their mobile turned off then you would not receive a message to say the mobile had received the message until the mobile was next turned on and if the user is anything like me I always forget to charge my phone and have it turned off for a couple of days at a time sometimes.

If I may make a suggestion.. I donlt know if this is feasable either.. but what about using the existing carriers sms network with a custom script?

Meaning if you go to http://www.mymmode.com/messagecenter/ you will see the form to send a message for AT&T wireless. All of the carriers have this as far as I know.

Can't someone write a php script to simply fill in the fields and hit the send button. This won't help the reply situation.. but it will enable admins the ability to offer sms free from their site..

was this any help?

Thanks
Dave

I thin kthat would be somewhat unfeasable as the user would need to know exactly which network the person was on, also you would ned literally hundreds of these sites in your list

Its 160

worldwide?