[LBBS-56] net_snpp: Add Simple Network Paging Protocol support
Referencing Issues
[INTERLINKED-12] Production mail server migration
Implement the Simple Network Paging Protocol (https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1861.txt)
Support would be limited to providing an SNPP interface for clients and then, likely, either forwarding pages to a pager gateway email address or dialing up the pager number and sending a numeric page (the latter of which really is rather out of scope for a BBS). So to be generic, the available actions should be to forward to an email gateway address (depending on the user) or execute some kind of external program with the received input, where the sysop can do something custom. Since sysops are unlikely to control their own paging equipment, providing tighter integration than that is more difficult.
Additionally, Spok does not (perhaps no longer) support SNPP, so even proxying to another SNPP server may not make sense these days. However, this module can be used to provide an SNPP interface for page forwarding to providers that don't support it anymore, while also providing an additional layer of security by not exposing a user's real pager address.
snpp -n -s snpp.usamobility.net -m "This is a test via SNPP" 3115552368
Comments
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1/5/2026 11:03 PM — InterLinked
Since I'm implementing both TAP/IXO and SNPP, I'm really implementing the superset of all capabilities supported by both.
SNPP is largely a superset in terms of functionality, but there are some weird edge cases.
The RFC for SNPP is actually quite sparse, lacking sorely in details in some areas. The TAP spec is much more complete.
One open question I have at the moment is tone-only pagers. TAP explicitly accommodates them and has error codes for sending messages to tone-only pagers.
In SNPP, the message is mandatory per the spec. It would make sense if delivering to multiple recipients to silently ignore the message for the tone-only pagers, but if sending only to a tone-only pager, it seems silly for SNPP to require a message when one can't be sent. Either you have to deviate from the protocol as defined in the RFC, or silently drop a useless message that needs to be provided.
Any thoughts? Have you ever used SNPP to send to a tone-only pager and remember how that's handled?