AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Impact of AT&T Email-to-SMS Shutdown

  • Some people relied on the gateway for low-friction alerts (e.g., filtered emails forwarded as SMS since early 2000s).
  • Others find such workflows archaic and note modern email/push filters solve the same problem more cleanly.
  • There’s concern for organizations (libraries, small businesses, paging workflows) that used the gateway as a free/cheap notification channel.

Costs, Small Businesses, and Public Services

  • Multiple comments worry that commercial SMS or WhatsApp business APIs are too expensive for small orgs, pushing them back to email.
  • Example: a public library using email-to-text for overdue notices; a small firm dropping SMS entirely due to cost.
  • Some commenters welcome higher costs, arguing SMS should be a premium, low-noise channel.

Spam, Carriers, and The Campaign Registry (TCR)

  • One line of discussion frames TCR (run by major US carriers) as a de facto cartel: pay-to-play, complex, slow, and burdensome, especially for MVNOs and small businesses.
  • Claim: TCR doesn’t stop spam; big bulk senders pay and keep blasting, while legitimate small-biz and customer-support SMS get choked off.
  • Others push back: TCR has improved, is a response to long-standing spam complaints, and a per-message cost “test” (e.g., $0.01) is reasonable.
  • Disagreement on spam origins: one claim says much spam is “internal” to carriers; another says it mostly comes via third-party platforms like Twilio/Bandwidth/Sinch.

Twilio, Gateways, and Abuse

  • Email-to-SMS’s demise pushes people toward SMS APIs (Twilio, AWS Connect, etc.).
  • One theory: Twilio is slow to close spam loopholes and tacitly benefits from abusers; another commenter notes abusive low-spend/burner accounts get shut down very quickly.

SMS vs Email and Apps

  • Some see SMS/MMS as obsolete in an internet-messaging world; others value its reliability, simplicity, offline reach, and suitability for short, time-sensitive notices.
  • Polarization over business SMS: some want it essentially banned; others cite useful examples (pharmacy pickups, appointment reminders, support conversations).

Alternatives and Workarounds

  • Suggested tools: Twilio-like services, Pushover, ntfy (self-hostable), operational.co, VoIP providers (e.g., voip.ms), WhatsApp, Google Voice, TAP-era nostalgia.
  • Question remains whether other carriers still support email-to-SMS for server-originated alerts; no clear answer in the thread.

Apple Messages / Email-SMS Oddities

  • Several posts dissect how iMessage’s conflation of phone numbers and email addresses can unexpectedly route texts to email, especially in mixed Apple/non-Apple group chats.