AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17
84 comments
·April 5, 2025WarOnPrivacy
tw04
Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages. I can count on one hand the number of non humans I want to have the ability to send me a text and if this makes spamming financially impossible, I’m willing to deal with the baby getting tossed with the bathwater. There’s nothing so urgent I need from a small business that it can’t be either an email or a text from an employee instead of an automated system.
WarOnPrivacy
> Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages
SMS spam continues to flow. Largely from mass senders who can afford the compliance.
Legit SMS from small biz can't afford the cash and headaches.
somenameforme
Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email when most/all phones, even brick phones now a days, have internet? SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email. It made sense back before basically every plan had a high/no limit internet plan, but now..?
The only real positive, so far as I can see, is the 'instantaneous' send/receive, but again thanks to big plans now a days your email checking every 5 seconds or whatever is basically free, making that benefit more of a technicality than reality.
zja
Why would I want small businesses to be able to spam me as well the large ones? I’d prefer no one does, but less is better than more.
scarface_74
Why would I ever want an SMS from a business? Email is fine.
bandrami
Thank $DEITY. Why didn't they do this sooner?
WarOnPrivacy
SMS spam hasn't stopped. I still get it. What TCR stops is legit SMS traffic. SMS that is wanted - and sometimes needed - by the people who receive it.
Small biz and their own customers is who TCR stops communicating.
Big biz pays for TCR compliance and they blast out SMS like they always have.
drekipus
i think sms should be purely left to person-to-person communication.
i hate getting business sms
WarOnPrivacy
> i hate getting business sms
The big mass senders can afford TCR compliance. I'm betting that's who you hate getting sms from. Well, you'll keep getting their SMS.
It's small biz who is hurt by TCR. Biz who are run by people you've met and talk to.
I do business with lots of local shops and often SMS is the best fit for us to talk to each other. Except now we can't.
That's who TCR is protecting us from.
dlachausse
I’d rather get an email from them. At least with email I have a multitude of spam detection and filtering tools that just don’t exist for SMS text messages.
what
>businesses abandoning SMS
Good? Stop asking me for my phone number.
WarOnPrivacy
Nothing in what I posted was about solicitation.
It's about years of routine communication between a business and it's own customers that stops. Like my clients who had to stop providing product support over SMS - even tho that what their customers prefer.
It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose.
SMS spam continues to flow. Legit traffic is cut off unless the ransom is paid.
bitzun
> It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone
You have a mobile phone plan from which you can’t send SMS?
scarface_74
If you have a real business you can’t afford to get a cell phone from a major carrier?
whamlastxmas
I’m happy about this. I don’t want texts from anyone ever that isn’t a single human paying for their own personal line
declan_roberts
If you're looking for a way to programmatically get messages to your phone I recommend Pushover. It's reasonably priced ($5 one time purchase for individuals) and it's run by a solo dev.
radeeyate
ntfy is also a great option, FOSS, and you can host your own server
r0b05
Looks pretty cool. Thanks!
null
shash7
operational.co is a good open source alternative if you're in the product space.
bertmuthalaly
fun fact - this person (jcs) also founded lobste.rs
rubee64
[dead]
belden
Oh, yikes. I’ve come to rely on the email->sms gateway from AT&T. I’ve had they set up a s a forwarding address within my web mail for a few years now, and have filters which forward matching messages as SMS to my phone.
The formatting is often quite lousy but it’s enough to send me a nudge to check my email for a message from the library, a job I applied for, or whatever.
I wouldn’t have heard about this about it being posted here, so thank you!
wildzzz
Why not just have notifications only for that filter? I get not checking emails, I get so many that anything important is just ignored along with all of the other crap but if you already have a good filter, just use that.
idiotsecant
This is the weirdest notification workflow I have ever heard of.
baby_souffle
Right? The "notify me when this specific email comes in" problem has been well solved but on the other hand: https://xkcd.com/1172/
SoftTalker
Email is a standard protocol and nobody owns it. Text messages have the carriers as gatekeepers and they want to get paid.
kaladin-jasnah
I feel as if alternative solutions are costly and can price out small businesses from messaging customers.
My local public library uses email to text to send messages about overdue books. While they don't develop their catalog system, I believe that using things like Twilio is costly, and I hope their upstream catalog provider isn't unduly burdened by this. I contract for a small company and we switched to email notifications exclusively since SMS was too expensive.
Maybe this says something about how SMS is the wrong platform to be using, but it looks like business WhatsApp messaging costs money too. I've never recieved spam over email to text.
bandrami
> can price out small businesses from messaging customers
Inshallah
simfree
Another one bites the dust.
MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.
Since the FCC abdicated their regulatory power over texting during the first Trump administration under Ajit Pai, T-Mobile, AT&T & Verizon Wireless formed a cartel called The Campaign Registry which has run amok extorting data and cash out of businesses just to be allowed to go through a slow approval process.
Nominally, this was to reduce spam texts, but the vast majority of spam texts are internal to the Mobile Network Operators these days.
mikesabat
I think it's a little overstated to call tcr a cartel. Yes, it's a process, but it's gotten a lot better over the last 18 months.
People have been complaining about spam text for a long time. There aren't too many folks out there clamouring for anyone to be able to send them an SMS via email gateway.
For the past decade I've been shocked that email to sms was still allowed. sure, there are some legitimate organizations that have been using this route to avoid cost. But the whole idea is that if it's not worth 1 penny to send this message, then sms probably isn't the right channel.
AlotOfReading
Where do you get the data about spam texts being internal to MNOs these days? I keep track of the ones I receive and they're almost all going through third party companies that are themselves sending through Twilio, Bandwidth, Sinch, etc. This makes perfect sense to me given what I know of the market and how spammers operate.
mikesabat
How do you track and save these numbers? Manually or programmatically?
AlotOfReading
Manually. My MNO does pretty aggressive blocking, so I only have about 1/week to deal with. That's low enough that I report them manually rather than try to automate the constantly changing reporting process or deal with app development. The response is almost always some variation on "We've forwarded your report to the network we received it from".
witrak
As a result there always be a company accepting messages with false sender identity so scammers can operate easily...
silisili
I don't really get SMS/MMS. It made tons of sense in the 90s when we were all on our little Nokia.
Now, every device is internet connected. Email arrives in an instant. Whatsapp/Viber/FB Messenger exist and all provide a way better experience. RCS, 2 decades late, is like an april fools joke. Why are we still using this?
mmooss
> MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.
MMS uses SMTP "with minor differences"? I've never heard that.
usr1106
It's an incorrect statement. An MMS is delivered by sending an SMS to the recipient phone and the phone fetching the message via http. Very unlike SMTP.
declan_roberts
Almost all of my spam messages are MMS text messages from throwaway mobile numbers.
LordShredda
Can you elaborate a bit more on the similarity between MMS and email? I'm curious to know how similar. Is there an MMS RFC?
baby_souffle
Telco has so, so, so, so many obscure and complicated technical specifications. They love their acronyms...
https://www.openmobilealliance.org/specifications/
Is probably a decent place to start
kstrauser
I miss having a carrier that had a dialup modem TAP server. As long as I had power, it was almost certain that the phone lines would also be up, and I could make a POTS call to send an alert. That was super convenient.
m463
Are there phone carriers that do support this? I send text messages from my servers.
typeofhuman
Can someone explain why my wife's texts from her iPhone routinely get sent to my email address?
js2
Yes. It's because the Messages UI conflates iMessage groups (blue bubbles) with SMS/MMS/RCS groups (green bubbles), combined with the fact that you can iMessage an Apple user using either their phone number or any email address they have enabled for iMessaging.
So say you start a group message to Apple users. You add type their names and don't pay attention to whether Messages is using their phone number or email address to add them to the group. (Even worse, after you're done typing their name, Messages only shows the name so you can't even tell how they've been added w/o taping their name again.)
Now, when it's an iMessage group (blue bubbles), it doesn't matter how you added them.
But as soon as you add a non-Apple user, it becomes an SMS/MMS/RCS group (green bubbles).
Guess what happens to the Apple users who were added by email address? That's right, they get emails.
There's no indication whatsoever to anyone in the group that this is happening. And as a member of the group, you can't fix how you were added. The message group has to be abandoned and a new group needs to be created using only phone numbers.
It's a terrible UI. I've been dealing with it for years because originally I used Google Voice and there's both Apple and Android users in my extended family. But even after I finally ported my number over to my phone, my extended family still sometimes adds me to SMS/MMS/RCS groups using my email address.
(Why don't we just use WhatsApp you ask? Oh, we use that too. With varying degrees of technical literacy, we end up using all the things.)
sephamorr
I have years wondering why this happens from select iPhones from time to time, without any luck figuring it out.
dylan604
Could it be that the person has the email address saved as the default contact method in their contacts?
For a bit of time I had no cell service, but people could use Messages to send to my email address for my iCloud account. Once cell service was restored to the device, messages from one person always came addressed to the email while everyone else reverted to the phone number. I just assumed that this person's contacts listing for me was updated, or possibly even a separate contact using just my email???? I never figured it out/confirmed it either
MBCook
I believe it is. And it’s fixable, but obscure.
They talked about it on the accidental tech podcast years ago when someone emailed him with the solution to this problem which one of the hosts was having.
I’ve tried searching but I’m unable to find which episode it was since search engines don’t work anymore.
So here’s what I think it might be based on what little I remember. When messages you’re sending are going to the wrong address, I think what you…
1. Tap the contact pic at the top of the iMessage thread
2. On the first row of buttons, tap the far right “info” button with a generic contact poster icon
3. Tap the “message” link
4. All their iMessage addresses will pop up, choose the one you want to use
I think that might “move” the thread to the right place.
I know in your case it sounds like it’s the other party who would need to do this. If this doesn’t actually do anything or create a second thread, I’m sorry. I know there’s a way I just don’t remember it if it’s not the above.
mdasen
.
mikesabat
I think a penny is about the right price. What are the other options and how are those working?
50 percent of email is spam and Gmail has had to create multiple invoices to segment the emails that are probably not going to be read.
Snail mail is probably $1 to send something that will likely be thrown out.
Phone calls - we're rounding the corner after the days of auto insurance calls. But the behavior of only answering known callers might be here to stay.
Sms is the best channel at enforcing opt-in and if it's not worth $0.01 to reach me with the message, sms probably isn't the right channel
fn-mote
> If your city has 20,000 people sign up for text alerts, each alert you send is going to cost you $200
The city texts are fine, but you can see during campaign season that $0.01 is WAY WAY below their per-voter spend for their ad campaigns. I get texts from everybody in the race, even "thank you, I'm doing great, please re-elect me" texts from incumbents.
MBCook
I got texts from candidates all over the country. I’m not going to donate to a random small city race 12 states over.
How about a $1/message politician surcharge?
SoftTalker
They stopped working for me a few weeks ago
jgalt212
I used web-based WhatsApp to get messages on my phone.
jMyles
Not sure the future of SMS in my life, but dang for whatever reason, people still want to use it.
I don't have as much need for email-=>sms gateways, but what about the other way? I much prefer to handle comms on my desktop, and presently I use google voice for SMS. It leaves plenty to be desired, though. Are there better alternatives?
Major carriers are increasingly hostile to SMS that don't originate from one of their customers' handset.
Killing off this gateway cuts off an avenue of escape that people might use to avoid TCR.
If you haven't heard of TCR, you should check it out because it is negatively impacting you somewhere.
Overseen by TMobile, The Campaign Registry is a pay-to-play scheme that applies to everyone who wants to send SMS to a ATT/TM/Vz user.
To onboard with TCR, applicants have to:
The end result is more and more biz, MNVOs, orgs, etc are abandoning SMS. Trying to comply with TCR is too big a resource-sink for them.