Schinckel.net

I received a comment on one of my blog posts about http://australia.sms-txt.co.uk, an apparently free method of sending SMS text messages over the internet. Don’t use this system, for several extremely important reasons:

• Your recipient does not recieve your message, but instead a placeholder message, to which they must either send a premium priced message to a 19-number - minimum cost of 50c, I don’t know the actual cost, or visit a website, and pay 50c via PayPal to view the message.
• It’s system for sending a message requires you to add a person to your address book first, you can’t, like SMSPup.com.au send a message to someone, and then decide to add them to your Address Book.
• The system is very insecure. You are given a link with a number at the end to visit a website. It is possible to change this number, and then view the message of someone else. Or, at least, I assume it is. I wasn’t going to waste 50c to see if this is the case. If a message can only be viewed once, then it would be possible to hijack someone else’s messages, if you were prepared to pay the money, thus preventing them from viewing them.
• You cannot send a second message until a person has replied/retreived the first. What happens if the person chooses not to? You cannot send them another…

Thus, this system is not free. Whilst it costs nothing to send, it costs at least 50c to retrieve. This is contrary to the normal way SMS charges are applied in Australia, which are sender-based. At least you can choose not to retrieve a message, so if “James” keeps sending me SMSs, I can ignore him. Similar to how Optus keeps sending me advertising MMSs. And I keep ignoring them.