How Do I Send SMS Messages Using My ICQ Account ?

[Mark Doliner]

(Move devel at pidgin.im to BCC and CC support at pidgin.im. Sorry, my bad.)

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Mark Doliner <mark at kingant.net> wrote:
> (+devel at pidgin.im so other people can benefit from this discussion)
>
> On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Jay F Shachter <jay at m5.chicago.il.us> wrote:
>> Centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted that Mark Doliner would write on Tue Dec  3 01:41:25 2013:
>>
>>> It sounds like you're doing everything correctly. I don't know why it
>>> isn't working. It doesn't work for me, either (from an AIM account nor
>>> an ICQ account).
>>>
>>> I see two equally likely possibilities:
>>> 1. The functionality is broken or disabled in the AIM and ICQ servers.
>>> 2. The AIM and ICQ protocol has changed slightly and Pidgin isn't
>>>    behaving as needed in order for this to function.
>>>
>>> We could probably narrow the problem down further by checking if this
>>> functionality still exists in official AIM and ICQ clients and whether
>>> it still works there.
>>
>> I tried using their own Web-ICQ and it still didn't work.  The
>> symptoms were different.  Their Web-ICQ told me that my contacts were
>> offline (which is untrue, they were cellphone contacts, and their
>> cellphones were turned on, so they were not offline).  On the other
>> hand, pidgin (and also empathy, I tried that too) tells me that my
>> contacts are online, which is true, and it allows me to IM them, but
>> the IM messages are never texted to their cellphones, they just
>> disappear.
>
> I think the online/offline status is not important. AOL, AIM, ICQ,
> Web-ICQ, Pidgin, etc. have no idea whether the person's phone is on or
> off. That functionality isn't supported by the SMS network. Moreover,
> SMS is a store-and-forward system, where if a phone is off or
> disconnected then text messages destined for that phone will be stored
> until the next time the phone connects to the mobile network.
>
> Pidgin ALWAYS shows "+NNNNNNNNNNN" contacts as online to make it
> easier to send messages to them.