I know all about this. Every time Telstra went down at an old workplace the uptime agent would send several hundred SMSes, all queued up on the local server while it waited for the link to come back up. The work cellphone was an old one and could only hold ten messages at once, so it took all day to receive and delete them. You knew the link had gone down in the night because all next day you'd hear BEEP*buzz*buzz* from our side of the room.

The guy who replaced our system admin didn't like the SMS server notifications so he turned the work cellphone off permanently. One of the test page the agent used was then moved or deleted and it racked up $4k in SMS messages to his phone over a couple of weeks.
Justin Cook - Signature

Justin Cook
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http://www.skull.co.nz/

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Michael Jager wrote: 
On 10/6/06 5:20 AM, Joe Abley wrote:

  
The trouble with SMTP gateways, though, is that (a) messages can get  
held up for long periods in queues, with no timely notification of  
the delay to the system originating the page, and (b) if you can send  
mail to your pager, so can ten thousand evil spammers.
    

The other thing to remember is that depending on your application, an 
SMTP gateway may not be reliably reachable.

If you're trying to page people when devices/providers/cables/whatever 
fail, the gateway wont receive the page if a cable/switch/router/media 
converter/provider between whatever's speaking SMTP on your network and 
the gateway has blown up.

Depends on your requirements, and this can be worked around anyway (two 
monitoring points, etc).

Michael

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