sms4you is a Free Software application that forwards messages from and to SMS and connects either with sms4you-xmpp or sms4you-email to choose the other mean of communication. It is ice for receiving or sending SMS, independently from carrying a SIM card.

Idea

Connect a suitable GSM modem or phone containing a SIM card into a computer (e.g. a Raspberry Pi) at a fixed place. Give sms4you access to either a simple email address or a small xmpp server. It will use this connection to receive emails or xmpp messages to be sent out as SMS and to send out emails or xmpp messages with received SMS messages.

Concretely - why?

There can be many reasons, why you want to use sms4you. Here are some examples:

• You are living in the internetz, and you just need a gateway to this old thing “SMS”, which some people really still seem to use.
• You travel and use local SIM cards, but you still want to be able to receive SMS confirmation codes from banks and services.
• You don’t want to carry a (registered) SIM card for good reasons, but still you want to be able to send and receive SMS.

The technical implementation

We implemented sms4you as Python daemon, using Asynchronous I/O. For the connection with the modem it uses ModemManager. The different gateways for email and xmpp have different depenedencies and are wrapped therefore into different sub-projects. The software has been packaged by us and is available in Debian 10 (buster) backports sources and following releases, and Ubuntu starting from 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla). Its source code is available in its repository.

Installation and use

On Debian and Ubuntu:

$ apt install sms4you-email (or sms4you-xmpp alternatively).

And adjust the configuration files. For more information on how to install and use sms4you you may check out the README file.