SMS

The SMS number is issued by a Google Voice account. When a participant sends a SMS message to this number, the message is converted into email in the associated Gmail account. In an earlier version of the process, ofxMailUtils, an open source toolkit from the Openframeworks forum, was used to acquire the messages from the Gmail account. However, the program could not retreive any Gmail messages directly. It only worked when the messages were forwarded to different email account which resulted in delay times of up to 10 seconds. At first, it didn’t seem to be a significant problem. However, it became a more prominent issue during the user testing. The delay resulted in long wait times during the live performance where participants are expecting instantaneous results of their input. At times, SMS messages did not arrive from the secondary email account until much later, especially when there were higher volumes of messages. It turns out that Gmail only accepts connections from secure mail programs. The ofxMailUtils toolkit did not have this capability. To resolve this issue, an opensource application, mpop, was integrated into the OF program. Mpop can connect to email servers securely (via SSL). The application no longer needs to use the email relay. It can connect directly – and quickly to Gmail to retrieve the Google Voice SMS messages.