OMA MMS Postcard conformance

Posted by on Oct 14, 2008 in Support Blog

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An odd question came in via e-mail, and I thought it was worth noting here…

Please confirm the below feature is supported in Latest version of
NowSMS:

MMS postcard services Under “OMA MMS specs 1.3” is supported in “Jun 2008 NowSMS version”.


What is an MMS postcard?

MMS Postcard is a name for a collection of person-to-service/application services where multimedia content of an MM is printed and physically delivered to recipient via postal services.

Basically the idea behind MMS Postcard support is that you snap a picture with your camera phone and send it to your grandmother as a conventional postcard that she receives in the post.

Behind the scenes what happens is that the MMS message is actually sent to a phone number or short code. One or more images is included in the MMS message, along with one or more VCARD objects. The VCARD object contains a physical address to which the post card should be mailed.

From a NowSMS MMSC perspective, there is no requirement for any additional functionality to support OMA MMS Postcard conformance.

All of the conformance requirements defined in the relevant OMA MMS Conformance specification for postcards are client based, not server based.

From a server perspective, the server only needs to be able to support VCARD objects in the MMS message. NowSMS does support VCARD objects in an MMS message.

There is an optional client element, the X-MMS-GREETINGTEXT header, defined as optional for postcard conformance, which NowSMS does NOT support.

The primary reason that NowSMS does not support this is because this header is defined only for MM1 in the OMA specifications. It is not defined in the 3GPP specifications for MM4, MM7 or any other MMS interfaces. The typical usage case for an MMS postcard would be that the MMS client would attach the physical addresses to the MMS message as VCARD objects, and send the message over MMS to a short code. The short code would be routed to a postcard service via MM7. MM7 does not define any mapping for the X-MMS-GREETINGTEXT header, therefore it is not possible to deliver this header to a postcard service. This is why NowSMS cannot support this optional header.

I don’t expect MMS postcards to be a major business, but if they are, I guess the NowSMS MMSC is ready for them.

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