Receive SMS Extension Available??

No matter which text messaging service you decide to use, you can receive your text messages into Airtable by using Make’s automations and integrations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

In general, I do not recommend Twilio for text messaging, as it is EXTREMELY overpriced and it is EXTREMELY complicated to setup.

There are much better, much easier, much simpler, and much cheaper SMS providers than Twilio — and all of them can be automated using Make.

For example, there is MessageBird and TextMagic and SimpleTexting.

SimpleTexting is my current favorite, and I give a demonstration on Airtable and SimpleTexting on this Airtable podcast episode:

• Sending and receiving text messages in Airtable with SimpleTexting.

I also give a demonstration on Airtable and Twilio here, but as I mentioned above, I do not recommend Twilio: 

• Sending and receiving text messages in Airtable with Twilio.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

receive SMS to a specific number, and have that populate field (or Create Record) in a base.

This sounds like it would be very handy, but to be honest, I’d be worried about spam, wrong numbers, and malicious record creation. Unlike an Airtable form, you can’t control who is going to send an SMS, or what they are going to send. Even if you don’t publish the phone number, “security through obscurity” doesn’t have a great track record! 

-Natalka

Thanks for sharing those insights ​@ScottWorld! I was stuck with Twilio, and would love to check out SimpleTexting. Re: security ​@nroshak, I guess that the the same risk you would encounter with triggering automations when emails are received. Right?

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel   

You’re welcome, ​@Mike_AutomaticN! Let me know how SimpleTexting works out for you! :)

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I built Twilio in Make as one of my first attempts at a 2-way conversation back in 2021.

Used Twilio to send and receive SMS. Sending is pretty straightforward. Receiving requires setting up Twilio in Make/N8n. When a new message is received, check a contacts table for exisitng contact. If found, add a new message record linked to the contact (now you have a thread) if not, create a new contact and do the same.

For outbound, ensure you create a message record in the messages table and link it to the right contact if you want to see all previous messages sent or received to/from a contact.

While you can send from Airtable, you can do both sending and receiving in Make, I’d recommend the latter.
 

Ping me for consults if you need help with this or other issues: https://calendly.com/d/dvq-nvm-nhg