AT&T Doing away with email-to-SMS. Anyone have another solution?
Posted by reillan@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 41 comments
Yesterday, we received an email from AT&T stating that they would be doing away with their ability to send emails to phone numbers and have those emails get routed into text messages. It appears that service is disappearing June 17th, 2025.
Does anyone have any ideas for workarounds? My division heavily relies on this email-to-text feature for automated critical notifications from our Windows servers.
caribbeanjon@reddit
We started having this problem last year with Verizon and AT&T so we moved alerts to https://www.signl4.com/
CompilerError404@reddit
Use a service that will allow you to text. That's your only solution.
They are removing it because of the law changes for 10DLC.
AppIdentityGuy@reddit
What is 10dlc?
LordGamer091@reddit
10 digit long code, aka a new way for text campaigns while cutting down on cost and spam according to a quick google search
CompilerError404@reddit
What is 10DLC and why does it matter to your business
If you are going to text as a business, you need to register with the federal government.
Valdaraak@reddit
I moved my stuff to email a Teams channel in our IT team and set my Teams phone app to notify me on any new posts in that channel. Bonus is that we can leave comments on those posts as well.
reillan@reddit (OP)
This is really an exciting possibility. In that the company doesn't want to pay more money than they already are and we might be able to make this work, haha. Thanks!
Valdaraak@reddit
I will say I've so far only used it with test alerts, not a real fire. But being able to have an automatic conversation thread that the whole team can see and add to when something hits it sounds great in theory.
ExceptionEX@reddit
We've used it for a while, not for critical systems but a lot of customer initiated support and feedback stuff.
It's nice because the channel serves as an archive and because the conversations happen there to it gives insights and accountability into how the situations are resolved.
It does get messy if people have large signatures but over all it works well in this manner.
Still wouldn't trust it as my only means of getting critical alerts though
trail-g62Bim@reddit
I'm assuming that each different alert would need a different teams channel or is there a way to filter? If I have 10 alerts each with a different group of recipients, would that be 10 channels?
plump-lamp@reddit
Main problem with this is if someone removes the email or reconfigures it, you get a new random email. Also can't move that custom email to another channel.
I recommend creating an email, example ITAlerts@contoso.com and write an exchange rule to forward to the custom teams channel email.
ccsrpsw@reddit
PowerAutomate FTW here. Create a hook to take the email, format it nicely into teams format and then have that go to the channel. You can then do things like:
You really have so many options and things you can do with some simple(ish) automation; CIO looks good, you get alerts you want, and you can tweak components as needed rather than having a monolithic alerting system now.
My_Big_Black_Hawk@reddit
That sounds like it would cost a fortune in licensing fees
ecksfiftyone@reddit
Similar but using slack webhooks. Although I do still get email to SMS as an escalation.
MeanE@reddit
Stealing that.
trebuchetdoomsday@reddit
oooooooo. that's interesting.
good4y0u@reddit
Don't rely on email to sms. Use apps, teams, slackbots or something like twillio for an API alternative.
EyeBreakThings@reddit
I'm honestly surprised how many people relay on this service. SMS gateways exist for a reason.
NSA_Chatbot@reddit
It's way easier to code especially on older IDEs.
andyr354@reddit
Pushover
SilverCamaroZ28@reddit
Came here to say Pushover. Just did it about 8 months ago. Works well. Minor cost.
unkiltedclansman@reddit
Thirded.
jsellens@reddit
I've been using the free tier of pushover.net for 10 years, mostly for nagios notifications. Before that I used email to text, SNPP to pagers with hylafax, SMS via twillio.com and some other gateways. Pushover does the trick for me, reliably.
merc4815162342@reddit
We've been using TextMagic.
NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit
I have told people to stop relying on Text as a means to message people. It's unreliable, and insecure.
tons of chat apps. rolling your own messenger is even viable.
getting people to send fucking emails is a chore these days.
ohv_@reddit
Ntfy?
lost_in_life_34@reddit
We send alerts to teams channels
enforce1@reddit
Twilio or other sms API
Mizerka@reddit
Everyone is nowdays, we're trialing twillio
CriticalMine7886@reddit
I use clicksend here in the UK for sending notifications to clients - they have US plans as well.
Works well for us
https://www.clicksend.com/us/
kissassforliving@reddit
SMTP2GO
Works well for our email to text alerts.
sryan2k1@reddit
If the notifications are critical you should be using an actual alerting system like Pagerduty that can do escelations/etc.
If not you can always home roll something with Twillo.
Icolan@reddit
You should not be relying on email for critical notifciations because you will be screwed if your email system is impacted by an outage.
Setup a proper monitoring system and use a service like Pager Duty, Rootly, or Grafana oncall.
jcpham@reddit
This has been happening for awhile now with sms to email gateway(s) because I’ve ab(used) this feature to send weather and emergency alerts to employees for years. A hidden contact in O365 for every employee email@0001234567 added to a hidden distribution list. Verizon weirdly stopped working last year but 3rd parties that piggyback on Verizon still worked.
We migrated to a third party service to send employees text messages
Hoosier_Farmer_@reddit
do you have any phone that DOESN'T have email capability? (just email.)
reillan@reddit (OP)
I think all of the phones have that, it's just about the notifications being more prominent and faster to get.
matt48763@reddit
I know teams that use Pagerduty..
matt48763@reddit
Pagerduty?
admlawson@reddit
Without sounding like an AI generated reply, I did use AI (Perplexity) to find a solution for you. Happy to help if you want to dm me.
With AT&T discontinuing email-to-SMS and the new 10DLC regulations requiring compliance for A2P (Application-to-Person) messaging, here’s a Microsoft-compatible solution to maintain your critical notifications:
To comply with 10DLC, ensure your business registers its brand and campaigns through TCR. This step is mandatory for all A2P messaging and improves message throughput while preventing spam filtering. If you need a scalable, compliant solution, Azure Logic Apps with ACS is robust, while third-party services offer simplicity.
JBD_IT@reddit
You can probably use something like Zapier or IFTTT with Twilio to solve this.
chuckbales@reddit
We moved to clicksend.com a couple years ago when Verizon's email-to-text delivery was flaky as hell