vgsmail: FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Who provides vgsmail?
What differentiates vgsmail from the wide variety of 'bulk sms' providers on the web?
Which bulk SMS providers do you use?
So why don't I just get an account with one of your gateways directly?
Which countries do you support?
Do you make promises about down-time?
Do my messages always get delivered?
Do you add tag-lines to messages?
Will the recipient of my message know that the message came from vgsmail?
How fast are my messages delivered?
What will happen to my personal details and passwords stored by vgsmail?
Where do I get the Java Midlet?
How do I create SMS mailing lists with vgsmail?
Does VGSMail support alphanumeric sender ID, e.g. rather than showing 4478140000, it shows vgsmail in the sender address?
Does VGSMail support low credit notification?

Who provides vgsmail?

Vgsmail is provided by, QX Telecom Ltd.

What differentiates vgsmail from the wide variety of 'bulk sms' providers on the web?

This is a non-commercial service and for the foreseeable future we only intend on covering our costs, rather than making a profit. The project was born out of code which had been written for personal use;
We do not have direct connection to any SMSC, and purely provide a front-end to those other services which are already available on the web. However, this structure allows us to benefit in a number of ways:
- Many of the "bulk SMS" services provide discounts to real "bulk" users (often using in the order of 1,000,000 messages): no single user on this system sends anything close to this number of messages, but we hope that combining the usage of all our users together, coupled with our non-commercial status, will benefit everyone;
- Many of the SMS services on the web provide cheap SMS at the cost of reliability. It is not uncommon for them to disappear, become unavailable for large periods of time, or to route messages very slowly for a number of days. On the other hand, vgsmail currently has facilities to immediately switch providers if messages stop being routed reliably (this process has already been put into practice when one of our providers encountered problems), and can also route messages through different providers based on their ultimate destination;
- The cost of sending messages through the many available bulk SMS gateways changes rapidly and depends significantly on destination. No single provider is cheapest for every destination: by routing messages using such heristics, we aim to maintain the cost-per-message at a rate as close as possible to the minimum cost available on the web (subject to certain reliability and infrastructure constraints we impose on our providers);
- Both of these benefits are invisible to the end-user: as far as they are concerned, their messages will continue to be accepted by the vgsmail server in exactly the same way and will appear at their destination in exactly the same way.
As far as we are aware, no single provider is capable of demonstrating the wide range of access methods which we are already providing. We aim to increase the features of our service rapidly to include email notification and retrieval via SMS and a number of further features.

Which bulk SMS providers do you use?

At present we use Bulksms, Clickatell and mBox and Opera although we are constantly looking at and testing other providers. Your messages will be routed through one of these three gateways depending on their reliability (based on time-of-day and destination).

So why don't I just get an account with one of your gateways directly?

Because it would:

cost you more per message. We buy messages from these providers in bulk (significantly more than you would sensibly buy yourself);
be less reliable. Not one of our providers is 100% reliable, and their reliability changes significantly with destination and time. We dynamically change our routing tables based on reliability, cost and speed in order to provide a service as reliable as (if not more reliable than) the best of the three providers.

Which countries do you support?

We are currently using three different bulk sms service providers in an attempt to provide more reliable and more complete coverage. The provider your message will route through will be determined by a routing table based on the reliability of each provider for each destination (and this changes significantly from day to day!).

I don't want to give a definitive answer to this question as I can not exhaustively test each and every country myself. I suggest you sign-up and test your required destination with the free credit you receive. If you find that the country you are testing does not work reliably or does not work at all, please email support and inform us so that we can try and set up routing tables which will work for you.

Do you make promises about down-time?

No. We are non-commercial and so we can't make that kind of promise because it would cost us too much. In general we are rarely 'down' and hope to maintain this. The promise we will make, however, is to keep you informed of past and present down-time so that you can make decisions as to whether our reliability is sufficient for your purposes.

Do my messages always get delivered?

No, but then no SMS message is guaranteed to arrive. Further, the trade-off one makes in choosing a bulk (=cheap) SMS provider is that reliability will just not be as good as your home service provider. However we do provide email, SMS or web delivery reports which will inform you when your message has been delivered.

Do you add tag-lines to messages?

We do add a tag-line to messages sent using your free credit. These tag-lines will disappear as soon as you first top-up your account. For 'paying' users, we do not add tag-lines and never will.

Will the recipient of my message know that the message came from vgsmail?

No. The message will appear to have come from your mobile phone.

How fast are my messages delivered?

Generally within a minute. Typically they are delivered to the gateway within 10 seconds and will be processed by the SMSC immediately.

What will happen to my personal details and passwords stored by vgsmail?

Vgsmail will NEVER resell or abuse your personal details. We will only send you emails of specific relevance to vgsmail and will try to keep these to an absolute minimum. Even these emails can be suppressed by you at any time in the account settings. Similarly, any other information you give use will be kept confidential.

Where do I get the Java Midlet?

The Java midlet can be downloaded 'over-the-air' by pointing your mobile phone at the following url:

http://www.vgsmail.com/ota

The advantage of using an 'over-the-air' install is that on many phones you will only have to select 'check version' to update the software when new versions are released.

If you wish to download the java directly, they can be found here: jar and jad.

How do I create SMS mailing lists with vgsmail?

The easiest way at present is to use the email-to-sms facility. All you need to do is create an email mailing list in your favourite mail client (eudora, outlook, pine, hotmail...) which contains the list of recipients in the form PHONENUMBER@sms.vgsmail.com or ALIAS@alias.vgsmail.com. Once you've done that, you can send an SMS to everyone on this mailing list with a single email.

Does VGSMail support alphanumeric sender ID, e.g. rather than showing 4478140000, it shows vgsmail in the sender address?

Yes. We apply a charge of GBP1.50 to set this up. We may however decline such request at our sole discreation if we believe this facility may be abused.

Does VGSMail support low credit notification?

Yes. Just email us the balance level that you wish to receive a low balance notification email and your userID and we will set this up. A scheduled program will then check everybody's balance at 8:00am and email those whose balance has fell below the preset level.