Folks:
A variety of information is available as a stream of text messages. What if one wanted to collect these into a file or database? What’s the best way to do it. I don’t want the messages coming to my phone.
One idea is to sign up for a Google Voice account. This yields a virtual phone number that can receive text messages. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to export them from Google Voice.
Ideas?
I think Twilio (http://www.twilio.com) does what you want.
Google voice can/will send text messages to the associated gmail account as email, and from there they can be downloaded using standard IMAP-over-SSL tools and parsed accordingly.
Trouble is, a lot of those services that deliver data by SMS actually do it by sending the data to your mobile carrier’s SMS API, either by email or through something RESTful or something opaque. If you don’t _have_ a mobile carrier, but rather just a NANP number that you say can receive SMS, chances are they won’t work. (So basically, the only SMS messages you can get through Google Voice are SMS messages sent from actual phones. Handy if you’re trying to log your chats with a teenager, but not so much for retaining useful info from an automated SMS service.)
One might be able to build something that would work out of an asterisk or freeswitch server and an account from Anveo Direct (see http://nerdvittles.com/?p=5680 for details), but I suspect it would fall prey to the same problem as Google Voice does, in this regard.
Google Voice SMS messages can also be sent to your Gmail account, which you could presumably download via SMTP or something. A bit roundabout but it’s programmatic at least.
You can connect to an smpp gateway of a SMS Center.
You can export your texts from Google Voice using Google Takeout (https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:voice). They come in the form of HTML that looks reasonable to parse.
I’m going to second Twilio on this one. They have a mini-guide at http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/how-can-i-receive-sms-messages-without-responding on how to do it.
I run “SMS Backup+” on my phone. This creates a gmail label named “SMS”, and then all text messages to and from my phone get recorded in my gmail account as threaded conversations with correct To and From headers.
SMS ends up in an sqlite db file on an android phone. On a device with root access this can be easily exported.
I’d probably use Google Voice and this API:
https://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/
Yes Google Takeout. To database: https://code.google.com/p/googlevoice-to-sqlite/