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Forwarding Texts to Email

This guide will show you how you can handle incoming text messages and forward them to an email address.
We will do that by building a server that receives network requests from SignalWire whenever an SMS is received, and then sends an email.

What do I need to run this code?​

You can find the full code for this application on GitHub here. To run it, you will need the MailGun API to send an email.

You will also need a SignalWire phone number which is configured for webhooks. Within the Phone Numbers tab of your SignalWire portal you will be able to acquire a phone number: you should configure its "Messaging Settings" to handle messages using a "LaML Webhook". Then, you need to specify the public URL where your application is listening to. You can use ngrok to get a public address, see our guide on How to Locally Test Webhooks with Ngrok. Regardless of what your public address will be, this application listens for POST requests on the /sms-webhook route, so your URL will be something like https://<yourdomain>/sms-webhook.

A screenshot of the menu pane of a SignalWire Space. The Messaging Campaigns item appears under the Project heading.

How to Run the Application​

Build and Run on Docker​

You can either:

Use our pre-built image from Docker Hub:

docker pull signalwire/snippets-text-to-email:python

or, build your own Docker image:

  1. Build your image
docker build -t snippets-text-to-email .
  1. Run your image
docker run --publish 5000:5000 --env-file .env snippets-text-to-email
  1. The application will run on port 5000

Build and Run Natively​

To run the application, execute export FLASK_APP=app.py then run flask run.

You may need to use an SSH tunnel for testing this code if running on your local machine. – we recommend ngrok. You can learn more about how to use ngrok here.

Step by Step Code Walkthrough​

Within the Github repository you will find several files, but we're interested in:

  • Python/app.py
  • Python/example.env

The first one (app.py) contains the full implementation of the application. The second one contains some environment variables for configuration.

Setup Your Environment File​

  1. Copy from example.env and fill in your values.
  2. Save a new file called .env

Your file should look something like this.

# MailGun domain associated with your MailGun account
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=
# MailGun token associated with your MailGun Account
MAILGUN_API_TOKEN=
# Send Email From Address
EMAIL_FROM=info@yourdomain.com
# Send email to address for administrator notifications
EMAIL_TO=youremail@yourdomain.com
# Email subject for admin notifications
EMAIL_SUBJECT=Forward Text To Email

The application​

This code is actually very simple - you need only one route and one function! The first step is to define a function send_email(body) that will utilize the MailGun API to send an email using the variables from our .env file.

# Send email with MailGun
def send_email(body):
    return requests.post(
        "https://api.mailgun.net/v3/" + os.environ['MAILGUN_DOMAIN'] + "/messages",
        auth=("api", os.environ['MAILGUN_API_TOKEN']),
        data={"from": os.environ['EMAIL_FROM'],
              "to": [os.environ['EMAIL_TO']],
              "subject": os.environ['EMAIL_SUBJECT'],
              "text": body })

Our only route /sms-webhook will listen for POST requests from incoming messages and will use the JSON form data as the body of the email.

# Listen on route '/sms-webhook' for GET/POST requests
@app.route('/sms-webhook', methods=['POST'])
def sms_webhook():
    # Forward incoming form data to email
    send_email(pprint.pformat(request.form, indent=4))
    return "200"

Wrap Up​

When dealing with SMSes in large scale, you'll often want to convert them into a more manageable format. This guide has shown one possible way to achieve that goal by converting them to emails, using a remarkably short script of code.

Additional resources:

Sign Up Here​

If you would like to test this example out, create a SignalWire account and Space.

Please feel free to reach out to us on our Community Slack or create a Support ticket if you need guidance!