Patent ID: 8145245

Claim:
A method for distributing inquiries to one or more recipients and receiving replies in a telecommunications network by means of a Short Message Service (SMS), wherein questions in the inquiries are designed in a format suitable for the SMS service, each inquiry is sent to one or more persons per distribution according to a distribution list, and replies to an inquiry are accepted during a specified active time of the distribution, the method comprising: a) initializing, by a distribution server, a distribution by defining reply addresses for the questions in the inquiry from those available for the distribution wherein the reply addresses comprises public mobile communication network numbers or SMS service numbers, to which the replies will be routed, b) sending, by the distribution server, each question as a text message to a mobile number in the distribution list in wherein the reply address is shown to the replier as the sender, and wherein one or multiple active questions are sent to a mobile device with the same reply address, wherein at least one question in the inquiry is a choice question containing one or more reply alternatives with the reply choice being a letter, a number or another symbol available in a reply functionality of the mobile device, c) replying, by mobile devices, to questions wherein replies to questions are received as text messages, wherein the replies do not include the question identifier, d) verifying the correctness of the replies wherein each of the replies is matched with a question based on the replier's mobile number and either the reply address and the choice symbol in the reply or the choice symbol in the reply, wherein the choice symbols are automatically selected among available choice symbols wherein any mobile number receiving multiple questions with a same reply address will be provided with a unique non-overlapping set of different choice symbols for each separate active question.