I've subscribed to the beta for the Send SMS automation action. Testing with myself and a few friends so far works well. But I'm going to use this soon on a trip where I'll need to send SMS to about 120 people (to let them know that an event's time has changed, etc.). And I'm wondering how to best to do it.
Right now I've got a table with people and phone numbers in it. I added a field 'SMSMessage' to that table, and a trigger field. I write the message, then set the trigger field (to 'Send SMS'), and the automation runs, sends the text, then resets the trigger field to its resting state. The problem is, this works fine for ONE message. To send a bunch of messages, it's less convenient. On my computer, I can copy the message and paste into a bunch of messages; then copy the trigger value ('Send SMS') and paste that into the trigger field for the bunch of records. On computer, that's okay. But would be great to do this from phone, and it's not so good on the phone.
I'm wondering if I couldn't create a linked table ('SMSMessages'), like all the person/phone records to that table, then write and trigger the message ONE TIME in the SMSMessages table, and have the action then run on all the linked records in the persons/phone numbers table. Or is there another way to do this?
And does anybody know what the limits are here? Twilio says something about 1 message per second (I think). That's fine, but if I have 120 people to send a text two, will Airtable's automation engine (or Twilio) take care of that for me? I don't care if the messages take 2 minutes to all go out. I would care if a large number of them fail to send because then overload the pipe. So far I've only tested with five recipients.
Thanks in advance!
Will
