jeffcasavant / MaubotTwilio

Maubot plugin to bridge SMS in with Twilio

MaubotTwilio

Maubot plugin to bridge in SMS with Twilio.

Dependencies

Your Maubot instance needs to have access to the following Pip packages:

• twilio

Usage

• Create a Twilio account and a phone number. Create a project so you track costs.
• Load the plugin into your Maubot instance
• Create an instance - remember its name
• Set the values in the config file
• In Twilio -> Super Network -> Phone Numbers -> the source number you intend to use, under Messaging, set the A MESSAGE COMES IN webhook URL to https://<maubot instance hostname>/<plugin base from maubot config, default _matrix/maubot/plugin>/<plugin instance name>/sms
• !addsms alias [phone] will begin sending room messages via SMS to [phone] and routing messages from it to the room in which you ran this command. Use a number format that Twilio supports directly - the plugin does no format conversion.
• !removesms alias or !removesms [phone] will stop bridging to that number.
• !listsms prints a table of the currently bridged numbers and aliases.

Motivation

The plugin's design & limitations come from its primary use case: I am in a room with one member who was going to be without her smartphone for a few months. I built this as a quick & dirty solution to keep her involved in our group chat.

Features

• Admin list - only allow certain users to add / remove bridging (to control costs).

Limitations

• Numbers can only send messages to one room. This could be corrected in the future by supporting multiple Twilio numbers, and looking up (Twilio number, message source number) to room_id instead of just message source number.
• MMS is not currently supported though Twilio does have that feature.
• Voice (via text-to-speech and speech-to-text) is not supported either. Might be useful for an alarms room, or for any style of message you'll want to reach you during e.g. a work meeting.
• Other telephony providers are not supported (for example Nexmo should be a tiny bit cheaper).

Drawbacks

• Cost: at Twilio rates as of 2020-06-13, you'll pay $.0075 for each ingoing and outgoing SMS, and $1/mo to retain the number you're using.
• Logging: Twilio has copies of all messages in its SMS log (handy for troubleshooting delivery). Don't treat SMS as a secure messaging service.

Esoterica

• The package name for this plugin diverges from my other plugin (casavant.jeff... vs org.casavant.jeff...). This new format is correct. Not sure if it will break current installations of my old plugin if I update it.

Issues

Hit me up in #maubot-casavant-plugins:casavant.org if you have any trouble.