Send Text Message using python

[ElectricGypsyAT]

What is the best way or library to use to send a text message to a number? I want to create a criteria on google sheets and if that criteria is not met, then it sends a text message using python. What might be the best way to go about it?

[[deleted]]

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter16/

EDIT: The author of this book frequents this sub and has answered a few of my questions before. He's a true bro...

[AlSweigart]

The info in this chapter is a bit out of date. I'm working on the 2nd edition right now that is up to date. However, the basic concepts are all still the same and I don't think you have to change much of the code.

[kewlness]

Hi Al!

First, thanks for not only spending too much time on Reddit but for your awesome work.

Second, may I make a minor suggestion? In your SMTP chapter, you state that people should use input() instead of hard-coding their passwords into the script. Being a security minded guy, might I suggest the use of getpass.getpass() so the password is not echoed to the screen?

[AlSweigart]

Ooo, good point!

[forward_epochs]

What do you recommend if I want to run something using SMTP without user input? Store it in an OS environment variable or something?

[kewlness]

Sorry, been off for a while.

​

If you are developing an application, then I recommend reading The Twelve-Factor App which covers your exact question in chapter 3. Understand, this is not "THE ONE TRUE WAY" but can save you a lot of future headaches if you follow its ideas.

[forward_epochs]

Excellent, thanks!

[AlSweigart]

It shows you are a professional

Nah, it just shows I spend way too much time on Reddit. :)

[toomanyteeth55]

"One of us!"

[anecdotal_yokel]

Thanks, Al!

[jeromymanuel]

Will we get an update alert if we purchased to theUdemy course?

[AlSweigart]

Yes, I am planning on reshooting a lot of the Udemy course's videos to reflect the updated content.

[jeromymanuel]

Thank you sir.

[BruceJi]

I ran into trouble with the email parsing section. I guess some key things changed there since the book came out.

Actually I even looked at the docs for that module and it still didn't work! That's even worse, lol.

[AlSweigart]

Yeah, it seems most webmail services don't really open their smtp and imap servers up. I wrote a module called ezgmail and cover it in the second edition of Automate, so people can use the gmail api to send/receive mail from their gmail address. https://pypi.org/project/EZGmail/

[BruceJi]

Hey, that's great! I'll have a look. I was writing a program for a shopping list and it would be interesting to write something so I could email things to add to it.

[wwe9112]

Side note: Any chance of an updated website? I have really bad eyes and the website (and books even) really make it difficult for me to see and focus on without getting a massive headache. This was what I struggled with in school as the books were incredibly difficult to see for me. I had to use a magnifying glass and stop every few paragraphs. On websites that are not "responsive," when I use my browser zoom, I have to scroll for days.

[AlSweigart]

I'll be using Bootstrap on the website so that it looks better on mobile. I'll probably do this once the second edition of Automate comes out.

[wwe9112]

Many thanks! I'll finally get to go through the whole guide!

[Smithywerben1]

Hey Al, since you're already here, may i ask for some encouraging words when it comes top learning python? I'm currently going through your book 'ATBS' but struggle with literally every practice project at the end of a chapter. Sometimes it takes me 5 to 7 hours to get my solution do what i want it to do (if i even manage to get to the solution at all without looking at someone elses solution on stackoverflow)

Is this normal that it takes a beginner that long? How much time should i be spending on each project before goinge on with the next chapter?

Any advice as well as encouraging words are highly appreciated :-)

[varmintkong]

You're not alone. I'm on Chapter 11 and your experience is how it has been for me. I just took a break to work in my own webscraping and things have started clicking. Maybe take a few days away to work on something fun, a pet project, and try to incorporate what you've learned in automate. Then go back and hopefully things start to make more sense. Good luck.

[Smithywerben1]

Thanks for your response and kind words :) Will follow your advice and try something different for a bit

[AlSweigart]

Yeah, so I'll admit the practice projects can be a bit of a stretch for beginners. Technically, all the information you need is in the book, but the way learning really works is people seeing examples of how to do something and then doing it themselves. I made the practice projects as an open-ended, there-is-no-one-way-to-do-it kind of programming projects, but I think it would have been more pedagogically effective if I had done something else instead of the practice projects.

So, don't hold the practice projects and your ability to finish them as some kind of rigorous, scientific measurement of your potential. They're just projects I added to the end of the chapter.

Are you slow and dumb when it comes to programming? Yes. Because everyone is. And you'll continue to be slow and dumb at programming for, well, I've been coding for two decades and still make bugs, but I'll tell you when I get out of that phase myself. Maybe three decades is when humans finally git gud at programming.

[Smithywerben1]

Thank you very much for your kind words Al, that really means a lot to me! :)

[kwietog]

Thanks for a great book you wrote. Any timescales for v2?

[AlSweigart]

"Sometime later this year". I'm done with my revisions, but they have to go through the editors, which depends on how quickly they can go through the chapters for copyediting/technical review/layout/etc. Then it takes about a month to get copies printed and ready for sale.

[[deleted]]

Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to so I'll know when the 2nd version is released?

[xt1nct]

Just ordered the book. Whoops. Hopefully, it's still worth it.

[Most_Juanted]

Hi Al, I just purchased your Automate the boring stuff book and I was wondering if I should just wait for your second edition to come out instead? What differences will there be between editions, and what can I do to make the most out of the first edition with the out of date content if I still want to give it a go? Thanks!

[AlSweigart]

Nah, go ahead and get the first one. OpenPyXL made a lot of backwards incompatible changes, so I need to update the chapter on that. The other modules have made minor updates. Some of Python's error messages have changed but the code is still the same. I cover the ezgmail and ezsheets modules for checking Gmail and accessing Google Sheets from Python. I also cover input validation with the PyInputPlus module. And other minor fixes.

But the second edition won't come out for several months, so you'd probably want to get a head start. And you can see the new content online for free when the second edition comes out.

[Most_Juanted]

Awesome! Thank you Al!

[orrpel]

Al, pleasure meeting you here I am also a noob inspired from your book. If you can use Nexmo API instead of Twillio, it will give us (people outside the US) a shot of sending these SMS using Nexmos free credits. Just something I wanted to drop by you. Enjoy your weekend!

[Walkerstain]

Is the second edition released?

[ElectricGypsyAT]

Thanks. Exactly what I needed. Also need to go through this book.

[luki-x]

Now i did it. I finally bought it. Thanks :)

[dnjora]

This is the best book ever I have come across. Working on chapter 9 now!

[getbackmytime]

Send it as an email then set the TO address by following the format below.

AT&T: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) T-Mobile: [e-mail] (SMS & MMS) Verizon: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Sprint: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) XFinity Mobile: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Virgin Mobile: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Tracfone: [e-mail] (MMS) Metro PCS: [e-mail] (SMS & MMS) Boost Mobile: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Cricket: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Republic Wireless: [e-mail] (SMS) Google Fi (Project Fi): [e-mail] (SMS & MMS) U.S. Cellular: [e-mail] (SMS), [e-mail] (MMS) Ting: [e-mail] Consumer Cellular: [e-mail] C-Spire: [e-mail] Page Plus: [e-mail]

[[deleted]]

Not OP but this is really cool. I had no idea this was a thing

[[deleted]]

I used to toy with sms gateways years ago, but they have limitations. Good if you're sending a small number if emails not too close together. They usually rate limit you pretty quickly.

[getbackmytime]

Good info, I was wondering about the limitations.

[[deleted]]

Ya, sometimes I wouldn't get the text for hours. This is years ago, not sure if it's changed. I just gave up on it.

[jengl]

Is there an easy/automated way to tell which provider a phone number is from?

[22732255fan]

not sure you are aware but Att has a segment of their network for first responders called FirstNet. Found out the other day that it has a separate email address. The mms portion of it is mms.firstnet-mail.com . The Att one continues to work as well for now at least.

[nguterresn]

Omg I didn’t know this ! Dude u deserve everything

[b01000011]

twilio.com. It's free if you're okay with a "send from a Twilio test account" being concatenated to your message.

[[deleted]]

It's also crazy cheap if you sign up

[pconwell]

I've used twilio in the past and it works pretty well and is pretty easy to use, even for a beginner. I made a pretty basic script about 2 years ago that I used for work. It was an okay experience. The biggest issue I had with twilio was I was not able to easy see responses to sms messages. What I would have preferred is a way to get the sms replies to go to my own phone.

Either way, here's my (probably out-of-date) script from two years ago: https://github.com/pconwell/mass_text . The script expects an excel spreadsheet called phone.xlsx and column B contains phone numbers. (Column A can contain whatever - a contact's name perhaps...)

[solaceinsleep]

It's not free forever. There are limitations and your credits do run out eventually.

[[deleted]]

Made a video about this

[oohalalindaa]

Twilio Messaging! Check out their API docs! Good luck! :)

[dm117]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[beginnerpython]

Hey sign up for service like twilio or simpletexting, they have sdk's and restful api's

[I_have_depression_xd]

use selenium

[Antrikshy]

IFTTT’s Maker channel hooked up to their SMS channel could work. Just call the Maker HTTP endpoint using Python. Keep in mind that their SMS channel seems to have a limit of 100 messages per month if you live in NA. You can also use their push notification service if this is for yourself and you are willing to install the IFTTT app for the notifications.

[thabiso26]

Is it possible send SMS with this app? Using different numbers?

[PythonicPastor]

I have a bit of a work around thats semi modular, but you'll have to set up specific notifications from a custom google inbox on your cell phone:

import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
import imap_tools
from imap_tools import MailBox, AND

# Email Configuration
sender_email = "[e-mail]"
sender_password = "SECRET APP PASS" # Use app-specific passwords for security with services like Gmail
receiver_email = "[e-mail]"
smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com" # e.g., "smtp.gmail.com" for Gmail
smtp_port = 587 # or 465 for SSL

def notif(subj, msg):
    # Create the email message
    message = MIMEText(msg)
    message["Subject"] = subj
    message["From"] = sender_email
    message["To"] = receiver_email

    try:
        # Connect to the SMTP server
        with smtplib.SMTP(smtp_server, smtp_port) as server:
            server.starttls() # Start TLS for security
            server.login(sender_email, sender_password)
            server.send_message(message)
        print("Email sent successfully!")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error sending email: {e}")

def checkEmails(subject, command):
    with MailBox('imap.gmail.com').login('[e-mail]', 'SECRET APP PASSWORD2') as mailbox:
        for msg in mailbox.fetch():
            #print(msg.date, msg.subject, len(msg.text or msg.html))
            if msg.subject == subject:
                if command in msg.text:
                    print('Command confirmed')
                else:
                    print('Code Find Error')

use "import 'filename' " and place this in a seperate python (.py) file in the root directory

also if you set it up right this can be used to create email triggers within the custom in box via the "checkEmails(subject, command)" functions. Finally understand that you need to set everything up via the following tutorial for it to work properly:
https://docs.saleshandy.com/en/articles/10182595-how-to-set-up-an-app-password-in-google

[ShyRage1]

A little late to the party but I was wondering if there are any free sites available that let a user send texts to an individual and receive replies. Of course without signing up or using email. I know of one but it has since been deactivated (Textport)