DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / sms4you / sms4you.1.en
SMS4YOU(1) General Commands Manual SMS4YOU(1)

sms4you - Personal gateway connecting SMS with XMPP or email.

sms4you forwards messages from and to SMS and connects either with sms4you-xmpp or sms4you-email to choose the other mean of communication. Nice for receiving or sending SMS, independently from carrying a SIM card.



Connect a suitable GSM modem or phone containing a SIM card into a computer (e.g. a Raspberry Pi) at a fixed place. Give sms4you access to either a simple email address or a small xmpp server. It will use this connection to receive emails or xmpp messages to be sent out as SMS and to send out emails or xmpp messages with received SMS messages.

There can be many reasons, why you want to use sms4you. Here are some examples:

  • You are living in the internetz, and you just need a gateway to this old thing "SMS", which some people really still seem to use.
  • You travel and use local SIM cards, but you still want to be able to receive SMS confirmation codes from banks and services.
  • You don't want to carry a (registered) SIM card for good reasons, but still you want to be able to send and receive SMS.

sms4you is implemented as a Python daemon, using Asynchronous I/O. For the connection with the modem it uses ModemManager. The different gateways for email and xmpp have different depenedencies and are wrapped therefore into different sub-projects:

  • As an email gateway
  • As a xmpp gateway

$ sudo addgroup --force-badname --system _sms4you
$ sudo adduser --force-badname --home /nonexistent \


      --ingroup _sms4you --no-create-home --system _sms4you
$ sudo cp sms4you.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d/
$ sudo cp sms4you.pkla /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/30-site.d/
$ sudo chown root:_sms4you /etc/sms4you/{sim_pin,xmpp_component_password}
$ sudo chmod 640 /etc/sms4you/{sim_pin,xmpp_component_password}


Copyright (C) 2019-2020

  • Felix Delattre felix@delattre.de
  • Martin debacle@debian.org

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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See the LICENSE for the full license text.