getting Clickatell to work in the US

[josue]

hey folks,

after a couple of painful hours i have SMS sending and receiving working in the US.

i am running 4.2.9, purchased a Small Business API account for a month from Clickatell for $9.95

after trying lots of different configuration options on the Clickatell side of things, i realized that the cellphone number needs a 1 in front of it for Clickatell to be able to properly send it a text message.

once i sent it properly, i was able to send a reply text and have that show up in CiviCRM as well. very nice!

we have been having discussions about auto-formatting phone numbers in the Civi community, but nothing has been added to core. this SMS code, for Clickatell in the US anyway, needs to check if the cellphone number starts with a "1" and if it does not it needs to append it.

will test on 4.3.2 and see whether this issue persists.

for those needing step by step instructions for configuring clickatell, here you go:

clickatell instructions

Small Business API account needed

from Central Home, click on Connection Name: Auto Created API.

Enable SMS Status Notification(MT Callback) needs to be checked.
Your URL: http://www.example.com/civicrm/sms/callback
Method: HTTP POST

click on Number Type: US Long Codes (Small Business)

Reply Path: HTTP POST
Target Address: http://www.example.com/civicrm/sms/callback

nothing else needed!

Both of the above items are available from the Manage my Products page as well

on the PowerBase side:

SMS Providers

Username and Password - whatever that is on your Clickatell account
API Type: http
API URI: https://api.clickatell.com
API Parameters:
api_id=xxxxxxx
mo=1
from=yyyyyyyy

replace xxxxxxx with api_id from Clickatell
replace yyyyyyy with phone number clickatell provides for you

[josue]

okay, just finished testing on 4.3.2.

installed clickatell extension. added a provider. went to clickatell and changed the callback url to reflect the different site i was doing this on.

sent SMS to a number with a "1" in front and it worked.

sent SMS to a number without a "1" in front and got the dreaded "Routing error" on the Clickatell side.

same issue. in the US a "1" needs to be added to the mobile phone number if it is not there or the SMS will not be sent.

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

Does this same issue occur for Twilio?   

I ran into another country-specific formatting issue with Click-a-Tell:  In the UK, the number cannot start with a zero. (Even though the majority of UK area codes start with a zero, as far as I can tell.)        I wonder how many of these issues are best addressed in CiviCRM Core (with different rules for each county), or are specific to each SMS gateway and are therefore best handled in the SMS gateway extension.

[josue]

just tested it from a twilio account.

the text was successfully sent even though the number did not have a 1 at the beginning.

seems like the extension should be dealing with these issues...

--josue