Caller ID for SMS in XMPP

When you receive an SMS on a traditional mobile device, your phone looks up the number in your local address book and displays the corresponding name.  That works great for a small social network where you can maintain the list yourself.  As the number of potential contacts (coworkers, telemarketers, etc) increases, it becomes unwieldy.

For example, I routinely receive SMS from people in my ward or stake who I'm unlikely to contact on a regular basis.  That's a few thousand people and the population changes weekly.  I don't want all that info in my regular contact list.

Fortunately, I run my own little phone system that uses XMPP for sending and receiving SMS.  I wrote a gateway to handle the conversion back and forth between those networks.  That gateway can run a script to perform caller ID however I want.  So now I have something like this when an SMS arrives:

1. check my personal address book
2. check the stake directory
3. check 800notes for records of telemarketing

I also have multiple external phone numbers.  One of them is a junk number that I give out when I fill out online forms.  If an SMS comes in to that number, the caller ID appears with a "(junk)" prefix.

It's a lot of fun to be able to write a couple shell scripts to customize how your phone works.