Two Numbers/One Phone/Zero SMS Replies :-(

[heavy.thoughts]

After playing around with GVMax, it's clearly awesome, but I wonder if there's a way around this issue that I'm not seeing.

Part of the reason I was excited to sign up for GVMax is that I have two GV numbers forwarding to one phone-- it's a cell, but GV is set up such that one phone can only be tied to two numbers if it isn't listed as a mobile on either account (i.e., both accounts must list the phone as a "home" or "work" number, which essentially means GV treats this phone as a landline). After reading the documentation for SMS-to-IM group forwarding, I put myself in a one-person group in my contacts on both Google accounts, so I do *receive* texts on my cell as expected. However (and I should've noticed earlier that the documentation makes this clear), I can't *reply* to those texts in this fashion; I simply receive the text as a message to me if I do that.

Is there a way that I can route texts from both numbers to my phone *and* be able to reply to them? This one feature would make GVMax pretty much perfect in my eyes.

... well, that and maybe the ability to send your texts to an XMPP account that's not necessarily a GTalk.

[gvmax]

I use IM notifications and in that case I don't have a problem dealing with multiple Google Voice accounts.
Basically each Google Voice account (which is also a GTalk account) is setup to send me GTalk notifications.
On my phone I use Beejive which is an IM program with support for GTalk. What makes it nice is that Beejive can monitor more than one GTalk account.

The only thing I do that is not standard is that in GVMax I set a different 'GTalk Group' for each account to make it easier for me to figure out which GoggleVoice account I am dealing with from within Beejive. (Since beejive can group by  GTalk group).

This way I both receive SMS from both accounts and am able to reply to them (and have the reply sent back as an SMS).

Would that not work for you?

As for supporting other services apart from GTalk, I 'may' look into that. I think I ran into problems trying to auto-create buddies in other services. What xmpp client would you use and why?

[heavy.thoughts]

It would if I upgraded my phone. It's post-SMS, but pre-smart, so I don't have the option to run an IM client except via a very slow browser on 1X. :-( I'm already considering an upgrade in the near future anyway, though.

And in retrospect, the idea of forwarding stuff to another XMPP account isn't actually necessary. I was just thinking in terms of convenience. I use Jabber (as in non-GTalk Jabber accounts) for a lot of things, but it's not like it's a big hassle to run Gmail and Jabber accounts at the same time. I just like having everything as compact as possible (and even then, there *are* Jabber transports specifically set up just to link to GTalk accounts if I decided to be that finicky about that). This is all without even mentioning the fiasco that was GVXMPP-- no one wants to risk a TOS violation. I love GVMax way too much for that.

So I guess the upshot here is that I need to upgrade my phone. Check.