Twitter support for Iridium phones?

A few weeks ago I was in contact with another Iridium user. Though we couldn't get it to work with Twitter, I found some possibly useful links, including a page about Iridium SMS.

Since Jeremy Johnstone reports (above) that

+011-8816-5142-XXXX [..] is what shows on a normal cell phone when receiving an SMS from Iridium

I suspect that an Iridium number would be entered as (e.g.) +1188165142XXXX (without spaces, "-", or any leading zeros) at http://twitter.com/devices . However, the form of Iridium's SMS Service Center Number would seem to favour +88165142XXXX . At this point, I'm just not sure.

I also suspect you'll be forced to use Twitter's international number (+44...), in which case you can send SMS text only to Twitter (but click here for more, including some paid and unpaid alternatives).

It might be a good idea to direct your question (with a link to this current thread) to
support AT twitter DOT com .

If you do achieve anything, please let us know here, in the current thread.

Iridium Phones only send and receive SMSs to and from other Iridium Phones. You can send and receive email's to and from the Iridium phone though. To send from an Iridium phone, enter the email address, leave a space and type your message (120 character limit). To send to a phone, use the phone's number 88165142XXXX@msg.iridium.com or via the Iridium SMS gateway http://www.iridium.com/sendmsg/sendms...

@Celbrimus Actually, you are wrong. I've sent and received SMS messages between my Iridium phone and my Cingular/AT&T phone on numerous occasions without issue sending as an SMS and not via email or the web gateway.

I stand corrected. Though the MailASail support pages, http://www.mailasail.com/Support/Irid... echo my experience. Personally, have never managed to send or receive SMS from Vodafone UK or O2 using my 9505a (number 8816 316 XXXXX) but email works fine for me. (or even better dial-up and laptop)

I will update our support pages. However, the state of play right now is that outgoing SMS/text messages from an Iridium to a cell phone now *mostly* work. However, *incoming* messages are a bit hit and miss. It works ok for some countries (eg the USA seems to have a good hookup), but the UK at the time of writing (Feb 09) doesn't seem to correctly pass SMS messages from Vodafone, et al to the Iridium gateway.

Hopefully this will slowly improve, but for now use the (free) email or web gateways to send SMS messages

Ed Wildgoose
http://www.mailasail.com

Use twittermail as a relay....it's not a perfect solution, but it's easy enough. You can send an SMS to your twittermail email address via your handset which will then relay to twitter. You can take it one step further and have that feed your facebook status as well...

I can't even get it to acknowledge +88 or +8816 as an international country code, so I can't even get to the page where you are given a verification code.

I'm using a Thuraya so Iridium email isn't an option. And I don't think Thuraya have an equivalent.

Same phone code though, +8816, and same problem of registering it on twitter.

The country codes are +881 for Iridium and +88216 for Thuraya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya

Both have quirky inbound SMS messaging from traditional SMS sources and it seems unlikely or at least hit and miss if inbound messages to those devices will work (in general).

For example inbound SMS works from a US cell phone to Iridium (mostly), but does not work from a UK mobile phone. Ultimately the question is whether the SMS provider has routing setup FROM you TO the destination, and the more quirky the destination the less likely they bothered.

However, clearly bringing it to attention of Twitter is potentially a sensible idea since they won't prioritise a fix if you don't show the demand...

Notes on some Iridium limitations here:
http://www.mailasail.com/Support/Send...

Good luck