How to send a text from the user's cell phone number using Twilio?

I want to programatically send SMS / text messages from my Meteor app; many people recommend twilio for this, and there are several Meteor Twilio packages (findable via atmosphere and/or googling/binging). I don't know if one of these packages is decidedly better than the other, but for now, at least, I'm using the abhiaayer:meteor-twilio package.

My concern is that, when you create a Twilio account, they assign you a "from" phone number (you can't, apparently, just use your own). Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works, but before I go too far down this path, I want to know if the sender of the SMS -- IOW the user of my app -- will be able to use their phone number as the "from"/sender phone number.

After all, the whole point of my app is to allow the user to send out multiple identical texts (such as "where are you?" or "are you okay?") to friends/family, and then get a response back from them (to his phone, not to a Twilio-supplied number).

If it's possible to use Twilio with your own phone number as the "from"/sending number, has anyone got suggestions on Meteor package preferences (abhiaayer, andreioprisan, DispatchMe) and how that can be accomplished from Meteor?

I imagine the basic code would be pretty much the same, regardless of package used; e.g., here's an example from the andreioprisan package

twilio = Twilio(ACCOUNT_SID, AUTH_TOKEN);
  twilio.sendSms({
    to:'+16515556677', // Any number Twilio can deliver to
    from: '+14506667788', // A number you bought from Twilio and can use for outbound communication
    body: 'word to your mother.' // body of the SMS message
  }, function(err, responseData) { //this function is executed when a response is received from Twilio
    if (!err) { // "err" is an error received during the request, if any
      // "responseData" is a JavaScript object containing data received from Twilio.
      // A sample response from sending an SMS message is here (click "JSON" to see how the data appears in JavaScript):
      // http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms#example-1
      console.log(responseData.from); // outputs "+14506667788"
      console.log(responseData.body); // outputs "word to your mother."
    }
});

I did create a Twilio account, and have the "from" number (not my actual cell phone number) they assigned my account, and the SID, but I don't kow what the AUTH_TOKEN should be.

If what I intend is not possible from Twilio, what I may do is just write the app so that all the selected "to" numbers can be copied to the clipboard, so that the user can paste them into his SMS screen's "recipients" textbox; but I was hoping to afford the user the luxury of simply tapping a button.

I don't think you can do this (send from the user's own cell number using Twilio). If your app is an actual mobile app as opposed to a web app you can use the Android or iOS APIs for sending SMS from the user's phone. I'm not sure of the details of this and certainly with iOS it looks like you can't do so fully automatically for obvious reasons (you could just spam all the user's contacts for instance, and this would incur a monetary cost to the user).

There's a Cordova plugin here which can do what you want: https://github.com/cordova-sms/cordova-sms-plugin (I haven't used it so can't vouch for it but it seems to be actively maintained).

If it is a web app, your suggesting of copying the numbers to clipboard is by far the most straightforward solution and I would recommend that in the first instance. For completeness I've included some details and considerations below of how you can do 2-way communication with Twilio (or alternatives such as Nexmo) in a couple of ways, in case someone finds it helpful. It's not exactly trivial though. 1-way communication is a lot easier!

Send via API

From your app the user types a message and selects who to send it to. You app then connects to your server which uses the Twilio API to send N messages to the N recipients. These messages will appear to come from the Twilio-provided number.

Send via SMS

The user manually sends an SMS to your Twilio number and then you receive a webhook to your server from Twilio with the message details. You have to do the processing to work out who to forward the message to and then use the Twilio API to do so. Again the recipients will see a message from the Twilio-provided number.

Replies

When a recipient replies to the message, Twilio sends you a webhook with the details and you can determine who sent the original message and forward the reply back to the original sender.

Number Pooling

One of the obvious flaws here is that if multiple users send a message to the same person then there's no way of telling which message they are replying to. There's no message IDs passed with SMS so you have to use multiple sending numbers (one per unique sender to a particular recipient). The amount of numbers required is basically the most number of different senders one user would have to reply to (this is not generally possible to work out beforehand, so you would have to call the API to provision a new number on the fly).

To give a more concrete example say you have 2 users (S1 & S2) and 3 recipients (R1, R2 & R3). You have 1 Twilio-provided number (N1).

S1 sends a message to R1 via your app, you use N1 to send the message via the Twilio API. R1 receives the message from N1. If they reply, you receive a message to N1 from R1 so you know you need to forward it to S1.
S1 sends a message to R2 via your app, R2 has not yet received any messages so you can reuse N1 to send the message. R2 replies to N1 and again you can forward it to S1. If this is delivered in-app, no further problems, if the reply is forwarded via SMS then we'd need to provision a new number (N2) to enable S1 to reply to R2's reply.
S2 sends a message to R3 via your app, as before you can reuse N1 and still route the reply correctly.
Now if S2 sends a message to R1, we realise that R1 has already received messages from S1 using number N1. In this case we can't use N1 because we cannot identify who the reply was intended for. If we haven't already, we need to provision a new number (N2) and now we can send the message so R1. When R1 replies to N2 we know the reply needs to be forwarded to S2.

The more users sending to one recipient, the bigger (and more expensive) your number pool gets. It's probably worth implementing some kind of timeout (say 72 hours) in which the recipient can reply. So in this case if the timeout had expired after S1 sent the message to R1 via N1, we could reuse N1 for the communication between S2 and R1. Obviously this isn't entirely foolproof but it could reduce costs.

Identity

The other issue with sending from a pooled number. I send a message to Dan via an app, and he receives that message from a random number:

Hi Dan, how are you?

How does Dan know who sent the message? You'd have to add some identifier to every message (or at least the first in each conversation thread).

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33192091/how-to-send-a-text-from-the-users-cell-phone-number-using-twilio

标签

meteor

sms

twilio