As suggested by the name "Short Message Service", the amount of data that can be carried by an SMS message is very limited; 160 characters for plain text and 70 for Unicode.
Although this restraint unexpectedly played a major contribution to the success of SMS, long messaging makes it possible to overcome this limitation should the need arise (e.g. Unicode messages, email forwarding etc.)
We provide 4 distinct methods of long messaging which can be implemented on a 'strict' or 'graceful' basis.
At present, Long Messaging is only supported by the Email-to-SMS and Web-to-SMS facilities. It will also be included within SMS API 2.1 which is due for release in early June 2006.