Sent my yearly Happy New Year SMS this morning. After battling with my phone for about 3 days (trying to send it from my phone by connecting the phone to my laptop/pc and using a suitable software to bulk send it). I finally gave up and decided to send it via one of the online bulk SMS services.
I googled and ended up with www.expressbulksms.com and was pleasantly surprised at their speedy service. I sent an SMS asking if I can do a direct transfer to one of their listed bank account (also using the SMS to confirm that the service is actually still functional) and I got a response shortly in the affirmative.
I carried out the transfer, then sent an SMS to the company’s contact number with the details and very quickly got a response that my account on their site had been credited with the number of SMS I had paid for.
I logged in to their site, created a group (since I wanted to send the same message to a lot of people, I think I ended up with 1055 recipients), exported my address contacts to CSV, cleaned it up a little and uploaded it to the group (it even detected duplicate numbers in the list!)
Supplied the SMS message and off it went.
I soon started getting response SMS from several of the contacts on my list.
(Note, you can also send individual SMS via the service as well)
And the SMS cost about a quarter of what it would have cost if I had sent it via my phone!

And to cap it up, I got a phone call from a Pastor on my list (I think his number must have come from my mum’s phone – some time in the distant past when her phone ran out of juice, I think I imported her address book into mine so she could make some calls). The pastor didn’t really know me, but said as soon as my SMS came in, God laid it on his heart to contact me and he directed me to a chapter in the bible, quoted some of it and even prayed for me!

Wow! Now, I just need to keep on the straight and narrow, and more importantly believe to actualize (speak da word into being Padre!) those blessings!

Happy New Year everybody!