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:
1) pay up front and pay more and then pay forever
2) jump thru needlessly complicated hoops (that become ever-moving goalposts for small biz and end users).
3) wait weeks->months then GOTO 2 again. And again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Oh I’ve gotten weird about email, for sure — but this is more of an example of “the prototype goes to production”.
I put these filters in place long before iPhones were a thing, and when the only devices that supported push notifications were BlackBerry (maybe? I didn’t have one) and pagers.
In the early 2000s if I wanted to be notified to go home and check my email for something important, the email->sms gateway was really my only option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
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
Readit News
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.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.
Good? Stop asking me for my phone number.
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.
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.
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.
https://pushover.net/
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Dead Comment
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!
It’s worked for decades, and I haven’t needed to look for a different solution until now.
Thanks for the tip!
I put these filters in place long before iPhones were a thing, and when the only devices that supported push notifications were BlackBerry (maybe? I didn’t have one) and pagers.
In the early 2000s if I wanted to be notified to go home and check my email for something important, the email->sms gateway was really my only option.
It’s probably worth a revisit now though!
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.
Inshallah
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.
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.
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?
https://www.openmobilealliance.org/specifications/
Is probably a decent place to start
MMS uses SMTP "with minor differences"? I've never heard that.
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?
(word of caution: only works with US numbers)
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.)
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