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AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17
- leetbulb 2y ago...what will spammers do? Tune in now, as desperate scammers polish resumes. "Skilled at bypassing filters and reaching millions with urgent inheritances seeks new opportunity." Local carrier pigeons reportedly terrified.
- redundantly 2y agoNot just the spammers, but the companies that still use it to send page outs to their employee's personal phones rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means. Won't somebody at AT&T think of these poor souls?
- jofzar 2y agoThey can just use twilio like every other business that need's sms....
- MBCook 2y ago“But we want to send text messages for free!”
- no_wizard 2y agoThere’s been a leading theory that Twilio has turned a big blind eye to misuse of the their platform for sending spam. They have all these clauses, rules etc sure; they make a good show of it, but they are really slow for example to close loopholes, if at all. They’ve done a good job of making the whole thing look like they take it seriously while being clever enough to leave loopholes and obvious workarounds to anyone who knows where to look Or so the theory goes
- blitzar 2y agoDrop a decent enough spend and they will look away for a while. Open an account with a burner gmail and test out the api using free credits - shut down within the hour.
- no_wizard 2y agoIMO sms costs are extortion. It should be an open standard with standard interfaces and cost the same as email, which is to say be basically free. There isn’t really any reason why it can’t be that I can think of
- Dylan16807 2y ago> rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means What does PagerDuty do that makes things more appropriate? I would generally expect a middleman service to make things worse.
- kaladin-jasnah 2y agoI 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 2y ago> can price out small businesses from messaging customers Inshallah
- simfree 2y agoAnother 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.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoWhere 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 2y agoHow do you track and save these numbers? Manually or programmatically?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoManually. 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 2y agoAs a result there always be a company accepting messages with false sender identity so scammers can operate easily...
- declan_roberts 2y agoAlmost all of my spam messages are MMS text messages from throwaway mobile numbers.
- belden 2y agoOh, 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!
- SoftTalker 2y agoEmail is a standard protocol and nobody owns it. Text messages have the carriers as gatekeepers and they want to get paid.
- wildzzz 2y agoWhy 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.
- belden 2y agoI suppose I hadn’t discovered that! I set this up back in 2002, well before the iPhone and push notifications. It’s worked for decades, and I haven’t needed to look for a different solution until now. Thanks for the tip!
- idiotsecant 2y agoThis is the weirdest notification workflow I have ever heard of.
- baby_souffle 2y agoRight? The "notify me when this specific email comes in" problem has been well solved but on the other hand: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- 2y ago
- declan_roberts 2y agoIf 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. https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/
- radeeyate 2y agontfy is also a great option, FOSS, and you can host your own server
- r0b05 2y agoLooks pretty cool. Thanks!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bertmuthalaly 2y agofun fact - this person (jcs) also founded lobste.rs
- rubee64 2y ago[dead]
- shash7 2y agooperational.co is a good open source alternative if you're in the product space.
- jMyles 2y agoNot 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?
- typeofhuman 2y agoCan someone explain why my wife's texts from her iPhone routinely get sent to my email address?
- sephamorr 2y agoI have years wondering why this happens from select iPhones from time to time, without any luck figuring it out.
- dylan604 2y agoCould 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 2y agoI 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.
- js2 2y ago
- mdasen 2y ago.
- fn-mote 2y ago> 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 2y agoI 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?
- mikesabat 2y agoI 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
- jgalt212 2y agoI used web-based WhatsApp to get messages on my phone.
- SoftTalker 2y agoThey stopped working for me a few weeks ago
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoMajor 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.
- what 2y ago>businesses abandoning SMS Good? Stop asking me for my phone number.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoNothing 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 2y ago> 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?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoSubscription, not plan but yes.
- kstrauser 2y agoI 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 2y agoAre there phone carriers that do support this? I send text messages from my servers.
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- nassaraf 2y ago[dead]