Plugin to send 'private' SMS or Instant Messages from Categories

[JohnEhRedding (John Redding)]

Plugin to send ‘private’ SMS or Instant Messages from Categories to ‘outsiders’

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Sorry, I am not following, can you elaborate with an example?

There is already the Invite button on this topic, wherein I can send a one-click join invitation to anyone inviting them to participate in this topic…

[JohnEhRedding (John Redding)]

Many thanks Jeff,
The invite, I infer, can be sent to anyone who does NOT have a username and password.
In reverse can someone with or without a username and password send a Private Message to a specific individual who is a user but is in charge managing a category and activities associated with it. A dumb example may be, if we had an ice cream stand category and someone wanted to message the ice cream stand and pre-order something. Thanks again, John

[DeanMarkTaylor (Dean Taylor)]

See:

Configuring Reply via Email

If your Discourse does not have incoming email set up, here’s how: if you already have basic reply via email set up (which is common on hosting plans), and you want to add the ability to start a new topic via email, see this topic. You have two options for enabling incoming emails to your Discourse: polling via POP3 or pushing to the API 1. Polling emails via POP3 If you want to poll emails using POP3 you must first setup email polling. For that, I recommend that you follow the tutor…

[simon (Simon Cossar)]

this plugin is just a proof of concept that I developed in 2016. It should not be installed on production sites.

For sending SMS messages, if you are willing to use, and pay for, twilio, it is quite easy to integrate with Discourse using the twilio-ruby gem. Here’s an example plugin that replaces email with SMS messages for users who have supplied a mobile number.

scossar/twilio-notifications

This hasn’t been tested on the most recent version of Discourse.