AT&T Email-To-Text Gateway Service Ending (att.com) 24
Longtime Slashdot reader CyberSlugGump shares a support article from AT&T, writing: On June 17th, AT&T will stop supporting email-to-text messages. That means you won't be able to send a text message to an AT&T customer from an email address. You can still get in touch with AT&T customers using SMS (text), MMS, and standard email services.
Lame (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually used this feature quite a bit for alerts, Now I have to find a middleware solution,
Re: Lame (Score:4, Interesting)
Me too. It was an easy way to get text alerts when an automated test finished in tools that already supported email.
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Me three. And it has always been pretty reliable too, surprisingly. I am on T-Mobile and hope they don't drop it. Lots of equipment/devices support Email (UPSes, iLo, printers, etc).
It sucks that everything that used to be easy and simple has to go and get crappified to death or destroyed.
And they don't even say WHY. If it is due to spam, then the solution is simple. Just allow the customer to opt into the function, or opt in AND provide domains they allow to Email->SMS them.
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I use the solution for contacting on-call personnel from within monitoring apps. You can't just tell everyone to switch providers.
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Email-to-SMS has always been a lightly-documented, "best effort" (don't call support if it doesn't go through or is delayed), and probably lightly-used service. Due to email abuse, it's never going to be a service that doesn't cost some money to support, so I can see it getting the axe from all the providers. I also wonder if the shift to RCS meant they were going to have to spend development money to keep it working and decided it wasn't used enough.
I've been on T-Mobile for ages, and I've seen their emai
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These days, you can get email on your phone, so set up a urgent message inbox and have your phone check it these days.
Email to SMS was a thing back in the 90s and early 2000s when SMS was new and useful. These days, phones get emails direct. Now you can have more status information sent when some job fails and you can decide if it's something that needs fixing immediately, or rush down and fix it, or just log in from your laptop because error logs can be included with the alert messages.
Not that there aren'
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It's not lightly used. Most American cellphone users get notifications from at least one sender via their carrier's email-to-SMS gateway. Common examples include library hold-available and overdue notices and pharmacy prescription-ready notices, not sure what all else. Pretty much any company or organization (other than your phone company) that is sending you SMS notifications in an automated fashion, is probably doing it via email. It's orders of magnitude cheaper and
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There are multiple companies that provide bulk SMS sending for corporate use (plus some large companies do it themselves). All my notifications are from such senders - I don't get any email-to-SMS gateway messages. Bulk senders would otherwise get blocked; the email-to-SMS gateways have low rate limits. Even things like restaurants that use SMS to notify waiting customers a table is ready use real SMS senders, not email gateways.
Email-to-SMS (at least on the carriers I've seen) is really obvious and stands
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Used to be solid as a rock under Virgin. Then T-Mobile bought Virgin and it's been iffy ever since.
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Tried using this with Verizon (Score:2)
My alerts never go through. I think it's Verizon blocking them Now if they could only block the stupid spam texts.I've given up on email to text gateways and do a WebEx bot so at least delivery is reliable. More formatting options and ultimately just a curl call.Too much spam in both email and texts and everyone is trying to block the spam that you're more likely to have an important notification disappear.
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I’ve found that Verizon email to SMS or MMS messages don’t work well if using Microsoft email. It’s been working perfectly for me when I send the message through an email service I have on a cheap shared hosting service.
I didn't know this was still a thing. (Score:2)
Figured some techbro leech would have found a way to charge extra for this long ago.
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I believe they call it 'PagerDuty'
Revenue (Score:1)
My guess is it's about money. I have made lot's of reminder type apps that just send an sms via email, for free, why not figure a way to monetize that.
Re: Revenue (Score:2)
I would bet it's something more banal. The billable SMS load of this has got to be minimal. It's probably that the backend servers are coming due for a refresh, and some manager finally asked, "why is this even in my budget? Does anyone actually need this? Do we really need to keep paying for it?"
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other ideas (Score:2)
I used this a few times. I'm old fogey, though not an old fogey, and won't use SMS.
Does anyone know any replacements for people that don't see email?
Home network alerts (Score:2)
I use it for home network alerts. I guess I'll just have to switch to a dedicated email address that I allow to send alerts on my phone.