Problem with sending SMS messages using the Alteryx mailtool

I was not actually aware this was possible, but looking through the archives of the community I have encountered multiple posts by people who had various issues with this functionality but, implicitly, they were using Alteryx to send text messages. Examples here and here.

The very simple setup described seems to be one where you use a [phone number]+[SMS gateway domain] structure as the 'mail' recipient. This is much, much simpler than alternatives also described here in the community (e.g. this).

After some work I think I have identified the required SMS gateway domain linked to the phone service provider of interest, but my flow fails when I attempt to send messages in the manner outlined. The error is not consistent, I have got 3 different errors, all linked to the email tool: "Failed to send to one or more recipients", "Timeout was reached" (after 2 minutes the flow failed - the other error occurred after 1.3 seconds), and "Failure when receiving data from the peer".

Example screenshot:

(In the obscured part of the to-field is my 10-digit phone number (country code 45 + 8 digit Danish phone number).

I was not 100 % sure if the gateway domain should refer to '.no' or if perhaps it should be '.dk' for me as I'm located in Denmark. But it makes no difference, the flow fails either way. I'm assuming there may be missing infrastructure elements/accesses outside of the workflow causing problems, but the errors Alteryx provides do not really give me much to go on.

Any relevant knowledge, ideas or suggestions are welcome.

Output

Accepted answers

Alteryx_AR

Hi @BYJE

Twilio is cheap as anything, relatively easy to set up, and you get invoke all the calls you need to from within Alteryx. Also, it gives you a lot of flexibility. Try it out.

Workflow Text Messages (alteryx.com)

All comments

Aguisande

Hi @BYJE

Maybe I'm stating some obvious questions here, but:

- Have you tested the SMS gateway from outside Alteryx? I'd start with this, since it may draw a lot of light on your actual issue

- Make sure no Authentication is required (It's not configured in your Tool)

Once you're sure you can connect and send an SMS from "the outside", we can start debugging the actual workflow.

BYJE

Hi @Aguisande - thank you for having a go at this, and you should definitely not worry about stating something obvious, my knowledge is extremely limited. Assume I know absolutely nothing about SMS-messaging, aside from what information was included in a few recent google searches on related topics.

I have not (knowingly?) tested the gateway from outside Alteryx. I would not know how to do this either? I know I can send test messages to my phone from outside of Alteryx but that's it. I don't know if this constitutes a test of the gateway because I'm very unclear on how this gateway thing works - are all text messages which are received by my phone processed/filtered/... through this gateway, or is it just a sub-set of messages using one specific way to connect to the phone?

In my company, when we send emails using Alteryx no Authentication is required inside the email tool. I was making an assumption that this was also the case when attempting to send text messages. I'm trying to clarify that part now by reaching out to people who might know if authentication is missing.

Alteryx_AR

Hi @BYJE

Twilio is cheap as anything, relatively easy to set up, and you get invoke all the calls you need to from within Alteryx. Also, it gives you a lot of flexibility. Try it out.

Workflow Text Messages (alteryx.com)

BYJE

Thanks for the comments, all of you guys.

I ended up trying to make the Twilio solution work, but I couldn't seem to get the macro to work. However I drew inspiration from its settings and modified the Download tool and its inputs until Twilio eventually accepted my POST requests - I now have a working solution.

I marked ArtiRajput's comment as a solution even though I had to do some work myself and didn't actually have success using the tool in the link - however the key point is that the problem is now solved with a Twilio solution structure.

Alteryx_AR

@BYJE Thanks for accepting as solution.

Atmosgek

I had a similar issue and found that the phone carriers sometimes block messages sent from email addresses. Using the correct email-to-text gateway format worked once I confirmed the number’s carrier.

Atmosgek

I ran into a similar issue before and got around it by switching from the Email tool to using a script that connects to an sms api directly. That gave me more control over message format and avoided weird encoding problems. You’ll need to check what format the number and message need to be in for your sms api, but once I did that, everything sent cleanly.

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