Repeating Text Messaging

I’m looking for a way to automatically send a simple text message every morning.

I don’t think that there’s a way to do this natively and I’ll need to get an application or cloud service.

I looked on the web and all the services I found are aimed at businesses, mostly for scheduling appointments or reminding customers/clients/patients about an appointment they’ve already scheduled. They are overkill because of their calendar integration and scale of texts they are intended to handle. And they cost more than I want to pay to send a single static, unchanging text reminder to a single, unchanging phone number a single time every day.

I searched the iOS Apple Store and there are several iOS apps that look promising on first glance.

Does anyone have experience or recommendation for how to send a recurring text every day at a particular time?

Thank you for reading this.

Most carriers have an email gateway that lets you send a message to a recipient from an email app that will be delivered to a recipient by SMS. For example, a customer of Verizon can receive a message when it is sent to number@vtext.com (or number@vzwpix.com for a media/MMS message.)

Here is a list of some carrier email gateway addressing rules: List of mobile carrier gateway addresses

It seems that it’s easy to find a way to schedule emails.

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Doug:

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, after doing lots of searches and looking at lots of services, applications, and Chrome extensions designed to send SMS message, that’s exactly my strategy: Send a recurring email to phoneNumber@vtext.com

Unfortunately, this begs the question …

How do I create a recurring email scheduled to send at a particular time every day
Ideally, I’d like to do this via Gmail, since this is what I use.

Any suggestions for a Chrome extension to schedule a repeating email?

That’s my quest now.

Thanks again.

You may want to consider if this then that (ifttt)

https://ifttt.com/home

You can create a free account, then link your text message address, then create an action that runs at a specific time every day to send yourself an SMS at a specific time every day. The free account lets you create three “applets”, so you shouldn’t need to pay for a pro account.

Lifehacker posted a beginner’s guide that might be helpful: The Beginner's Guide to IFTTT

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It appears you can do this with Shortcuts.

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Doug:

Thank you for mentioning IFTT. I used it many years ago and had forgotten about it.

This is exactly the kind of light-weight approach I was looking for.

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Jeffrey:

Shortcuts never occurred to me.

This is the first Shortcut I’ve ever set up or used. It’s exactly what I wanted.

The problem with sending an email to an SMS gateway is that it is the “from” is an email address, not a phone number so the text appears in a new/different thread within the Messages app. If the “from” email address is in the recipient’s Contacts, then at least the Message’s sender is labeled. Otherwise the sender is a mystery.

This approach of having a Shortcut to trigger Messages to do the sending is going to put in the Message in the existing thread with all the other Messages from the sender’s phone number.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Just for the sake of completeness, I feel the need to mention imessage aka imessage-ruby which can be installed via

brew install imessage-ruby

which you can use like this:

imessage -t "This is a test." -c 555-867-5309

These are the full options:

Usage: imessage [options]

Specific options:
    -t, --text [TEXT]                The TEXT to deliver
    -a, --attachment [ATTACHMENT]    Add an attachment
    -c, --contacts x,y,z             Deliver message to these CONTACTS

Common options:
    -h, --help                       Prints this help
        --version                    Show version

Note that the -c option will send the same message to multiple contacts as separate messages. So if you send a message and use --contacts bob@icloud.com,joe@icloud.com you will end up with two messages, one to each of them, not one group message to both of them. This may or may not be what you want/expect, but it is how it acts.

You could use this with Keyboard Maestro or another Mac tool to send the same message at the same time each day.

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Indeed, you are correct, or at least were correct.

I created a Personal Automation Shortcut on my iPhone and it worked perfectly until recently. Starting some time in the last few weeks, text messages sent to another iPhone by this Shortcut using Messages.app stopped being received; the text message displayed in Messages.app on both the iPhone running the Shortcut as well as on my Mac logged into the same Apple ID (though neither displayed “delivered” under the text), but it never arrived at its destination. Curiously, subsequent, manually initiated text messages also were not received by this recipient (alone) until my iPhone rebooted. Unfortunately, after a reboot, texts sent my Shortcut again failed to arrive and again manually initiated texts failed to be received by this particular recipient.

So, I switched platforms from iOS to macOS. Unfortunately, macOS Monterey lacks Personal Automation Shortcuts and thus does not provide a way to trigger a Shortcut based on time (or at least I couldn’t figure out a way to do it). So, I decided to have launchd trigger a single-line Shortcut on my Mac that sends static text using Messages.app; I created the requisite launchd .plist using Lingon.

The Shortcut launches at the right time very day, but it presents a dialog box asking whether to send the text. Once I click ok (or whatever the prompt is … I can’t remember just now) the text is sent and received as expected.

There’s just one problem remaining, namely, sending the text without my manual intervention/approval.

What do I need to do to just send the text without throwing up a dialog first?

Thank you.

UPDATE August 21, 2022 12:09 PM

Turns out that I had “Show When Run” checked in my Shortcut. :man_facepalming:t2: Stupid mistake on my part.