Making Business Easier with the SMTP API – Part 1

Combining windows and the SMTP API can help small- and medium-sized businesses harness the power of SMS communication. Here’s a good, everyday business example…

The Business…

So let’s kick off with my fictitious debt collection business, where I want to keep in touch with individuals who owe one (or more) of my corporate clients a sum of money. This amount cannot be settled in one payment due to its substantial size, and will therefore have to be paid off on a weekly basis.

My messaging requirements are simple: I want to send each debtor a text message containing his or her current balance and a short reminder to pay their next instalment. Due to the fact that all debtors own a cell phone, SMS is the natural choice for communication. I chose the SMTP API because it’s easy to use (only requires sending a plain text mail) and can be integrated with Windows pretty nicely without any previous programming experience.

Easy SMTP Messaging

First off, let’s clarify this SMTP business for those who are not familiar with the technicalities associated with email. It’s an abbreviation for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and is what your computer uses to give you the function of sending email messages. So, you can basically say it’s email to SMS messaging.

That being said, let’s implement the SMTP API with as little effort as possible, and automate the task so that I can have my Saturdays off.

During the week I use a software application to update the debtors’ records. This application allows me to do a merge with Microsoft Word which means that information from the database can automatically be pulled into a Word document. Here’s an example of the content of the template document:

csv: Debt_mnumber|Debt_name|Debt_amount

In the template above, Debt_mnumber is an individual debtor’s mobile number, Debt_name is the corresponding debtor’s first name and Debt_amount is the instalment amount due.

The values for the fields above will be inserted when the merge takes place, with the merged file looking something like this:

csv:12345678|John|$323

csv:12233456|Sally|$98

csv:87654321|Jane|$499

…

…

And that’s the first step complete. Of course the problem staring me in the face at the moment is getting the above SMTP ready; that is, in the appropriate email format with all the parameters necessary to convert the above messages into SMS text messages.

Part 2 will be published next week with a detailed account of how we can convert the Word document above, into a plain text email – automatically! In the mean time, feel free to go read a bit more about the SMTP API.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.