Editing Distribution Lists and Address Books in NowSMS

Topic Keywords: address book, bulk SMS, distribution lists

The NowSMS documentation doesn’t provide any technical information about the format of the distribution lists and address books that are available via the web interface.

In particular, the distribution lists can be very useful. You can send a bulk SMS message to all of the phone numbers in a distribution list even if you are using direct URL submission without using the built-in NowSMS web forms.

To keep your distribution lists up-to-date, you might want to have an external application manage them, rather than making manual edits via the NowSMS web interface. This is actually quite easy to do because the distribution lists are just text files stored on the NowSMS server, and you can edit them external to NowSMS.

Alternatively, NowSMS provides an HTTP interface that can be used to create/modify/delete distribution lists, and to update the distribution list members. So you could use that interface from your application in order to keep distribution lists up-to-date.

I provided a fairly decent explanation of all this in a recent thread on our discussion board:

http://www.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/20322.html

That thread explains the file formats for the distribution list files, and it explains the details of the HTTP interface for managing distribution lists.

The NowSMS web interface also has an address book feature. Unlike the distribution lists, the address book is only of value to users who are manually sending messages via the built-in NowSMS web interface. However, you may have a need to manage address books for your users. Similarly this can be managed either via an HTTP interface or via direct text file edits. I’ve provided information about this at the same link as referenced above.

-bn