Forward SMS Messages to Email

Businesses get communications through many channels. It can be handy to have a searchable archive of messages in one place. Forwarding SMS messages to email lets you keep both kinds of messages in one spot. Plivo makes it easy to forward SMS messages to email using the most popular web development languages. Here we walk through the process with Python.

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Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To receive incoming messages, you must have a Plivo phone number that supports SMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment.

The code example below presumes you have a Gmail account, but it’s easy to edit the code to support another SMTP client.

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Create the forward SMS application

Create a file called smsemail.py and paste into it this code.

from flask import Flask, request
import smtplib

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/email_sms/", methods =['GET','POST'])
def receive_sms():
    # Sender's phone number
    from_number = request.values.get('From')
    # Receiver's phone number
    to_number = request.values.get('To')
    # The text that was received on your Plivo number
    text = request.values.get('Text')

    # Print the message
    print('Message received from %s: %s' % (from_number, text))
    # Send the received SMS to your mail account
    return to_email(text, from_number)

def to_email(text, from_number):
    user_name = '<email_address>'
    password = '<password>'
    from_ = '<from_email_address>'
    to = ['<recipient_email_address>'] # must be a list
    subject = "SMS from %s" % (from_number)
    body = text

    # Prepare actual message
    message = """\From: %s\nTo: %s\nSubject: %s\n\n%s""" % (from_, ", ".join(from_), subject, body)
    try:
        server = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587)
        server.ehlo()
        server.starttls()
        server.login(user_name, password)
        server.sendmail(from_, to, message)
        server.close()
        print('successfully sent email')
    except:
        print('failed to send email')
    return 'SMS sent to email'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True)

Save the file and run it.

python smsemail.py

You should see your basic server application in action at http://localhost:5000/email_sms/.

Set up ngrok to expose your local server to the internet.

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Create a Plivo application

Associate the controller you created with Plivo by creating a Plivo application. Visit Messaging > Applications and click Add New Application. You can also use Plivo’s Application API.

Give your application a name — we called ours Email SMS. Enter the server URL you want to use (for example https://<yourdomain>.com/email_sms/) in the Message URL field and set the method to POST. Click Create Application to save your application.

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Assign a Plivo number to your application

Navigate to the Numbers page and select the phone number you want to use for this application.

From the Application Type drop-down, select XML Application.

From the Plivo Application drop-down, select Email SMS (the name we gave the application).

Click Update Number to save.

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Test

Send a text message to the Plivo number you associated with the application using a regular mobile phone. The incoming message should be forwarded to the email address you specified.