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I'm interested in creating a service that will receive a text message and based on it's content send a text message back to the original number. I've looked around a little bit but haven't found any good resources for information on how to do this.

Can anyone point me to any good links to find some info on this or recommend what .NET libraries I should investigate first?

+2  A: 

I've accomplished that on the cheap in the past by setting up an email server that runs a script when a text message arrives. It arrives as an email since phones can text to email addresses. The "from" part of the email holds the phone number as an email address in a carrier-specific format, so I just sent an email back to that address via standard PHP mail functions and it is delivered to the phone as a text. I wrote that script in PHP, but you could easily do a similar thing on windows with a mail server and a .NET application with standard email functions.

Aaron
Interesting. Do they send the text to a phone number or to an email address?
Abe Miessler
In my setup they just sent a text to an email address. The general public using it didn't seem to have any trouble with that, even though most people aren't aware that you can text to an email address. We were operating on a budget, so that was best for us. There are lots of text messaging gateways out there, but I could never find a definitive answer to how I could use a short code phone number to get text messages to my script on my server. One option other people used was to buy a phone, hook it to a computer with USB, and read texts from the phone with some Linux libraries.
Aaron