The Email / SMS Adapter
Selenium ESA is a server-based software product which makes it possible for users of standard mobile phones (also known as “cell phones”) to send and receive email messages encoded as SMS messages. This means that users with the most basic mobile phones, with no integral email capability, can enjoy email communication from their devices.
Selenium ESA runs in two distinct modes;
The first is responsible for collecting emails that have arrived in a given user’s email inbox and forwarding them to the user’s mobile phone as a concatenated SMS message:
The second is responsible for receiving specially encoded SMS messages from a user’s mobile phone, and formulating and sending emails derived from the content of those SMS messages.
Selenium ESA requires the SMS gateway product, Selenium SMS to work. Selenium ESA can be thought of as an optional, “add-on” product to Selenium SMS. Selenium SMS requires a separate licence.
Features
| Forwarding emails over SMS | Selenium ESA polls email inboxes using POP3 and transforms emails found into SMS submission requests sent to Selenium SMS for processing and onwards transmission to the MSISDN (mobile phone number) associated with the email account. |
| Sending emails from mobile phone using SMS | Users of standard mobile phones can send SMS messages (including “long”, concatenated SMS messages) to the Selenium ESA service address / short code and Selenium ESA will transform them into an email for delivery using standard SMTP. |
| Requires modest hardware only | Allows concurrency levels and other run-time characteristics to be configured by you so you can balance performance and resource utilisation. |
| Character sets | Supports all character sets that the SMPP protocol used by Selenium SMS supports, including GSM 03.38 |
| Email “cleaning” | Automatically removes HTML tags from HTML format email messages such that a simplified, plain text version of the email is sent over SMS. |
| SMS segmentation | Automatically segments email messages into multiple concatenated SMS messages where this is necessary |
| Configurable upper limits for Email to SMS | Limits the number of concatenated SMS messages to a maximum, configurable value. |
| Database oriented | Uses a MySQL database to contain a register of all email accounts to be processed along with their credentials (user and password values for the POP3 access) and associated MSISDN for addressing SMS messages to the email inbox owner. |
| Multi-language support | Allows individual email accounts to have a specified, preferred language and allows any fixed text content added to SMS messages (e.g. “From: ” indicating who the email was from) to be in the appropriate language. Such fixed content is itself configurable. |
| Scalable | Supports high levels of concurrency, allowing processing of email accounts and mobile originated SMS messages to be distributed across potentially large numbers of threads. This is important for throughput and scalability. |
| Efficient | Uses database connection pooling and connection “keep alives” to ensure best performance against the database. |
| Manageable | Exposes a management interface based on the Java RMI protocol. Includes a command line tool which allows you to issue commands against the running Selenium ESA processes. Integrated with Selenium SMS’ control panel user interface “Selenium CP” via its own, dedicated monitoring and management page. |
Purchasing
Prices are available on application to Selenium Software. Note that Selenium ESA may be purchased with full source code and developer training if required.
