AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17
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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.
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.
You have a mobile phone plan from which you can’t send SMS?
Expense and complexity are also the primary problems with TCR.
It takes awhile. But I’ve never had a customer complain about SMS messages going through
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/sms-nu...
And this was the original use case I was referring to
> 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
Meanwhile there are zero businesses that need to send me an SMS.
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.
For the sake of discussion, let's accept that Dumbutt Inc, of Pikesnot MN is sending out actual sms spam.
Instead of ending the wanted SMS comms between millions of customers and the business they depend on,
how about the recipient of a Dumbutt Inc spam just give them a call tell them to knock it off?
I'll do it myself if it means un-crippling wanted SMS comms.
1. There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses. 90%+ of it is probably 2FA codes anyway, and the rest is tied to some potential transaction.
For the latter, SMS costing even 100x more as normal is irrelevant - we're talking about spending extra $0.1 on confirmation and reminders on a $50+ service (hairdresser, tire change, vet appointment, doc appointment, whatever) - so it shouldn't be disturbing to actual voluntary business between two consenting parties.
2. There's a fuck ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".
Fortunately, I live in Europe; thanks to GDPR, they don't dare. Except for PV solar peddlers and Bitcoin scams, which have a special place in hell ready for them - and MLM people, which are already in hell, but don't realize it.
Nah. SMS in its terminal stage after losing battle with advertising cancer[0]. There's no point in even trying to save or resurrect it without first getting rid of the sickness - marketing communications.
--
[0] - https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
In total SMS sure. And those corps that send the 90% pay TCR so they can keep sending that unwanted SMS. TCR is a good fit for the biggest spammers.
Conversely, 100% of the SMS I send to my customers are wanted; they pay to support them and SMS is how they want that to happen.
My customers have their own customers - who also want to comm using SMS.
For us, TCR has mostly killed off our SMS access to ur customers. None of my MNVO lines carry SMS any longer, because of the onerous TCR compliance burdens.
Likewise my clients can no longer SMS their customers - even though it has long been an expected part of their relationship.
To recap:
1) TCR harms small biz who send wanted, necessary and consensual SMS.
2) TCR also protect bulk senders of unwanted SMS senders, because they have paid for that protection.
Vigorously throwing shade at 1 while voicing no meaningful objection to 2 seems like an unfortunate position.
Good because none of them are bulk sending sms spam. Or likely sending any biz SMS thanks to TCR.
Meanwhile the actual bulk senders of SMS are happily firehosing it to millions of phones, thanks to the protections they purchase - also thanks to TCR.
If these were legit businesses, they would send it to my email so it can be listed with all the GeekSquad invoices I receive from Gmail addresses. Of course, because everyone is just like the average HN user, they know how to set up intricate filters to prioritize the GeekSquad invoices.
Right. That's who TCR doesn't stop.
But lets say you buy a DIY home upgrade from a local biz and the two of you are in a support session and are sending pics and messages back and forth over SMS.
This is what TCR stops.
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.
Because doing me doing tech support over SMS often flows much better than email.
That's one reason but there are a lot.
You can't port email addresses unless you own the domain. For the majority of people SMS is the more portable option because they can freely port their phone number to a different carrier.
Well, luckily I live in country where SMS spam is not an issue. If I look at the inbox of our IoT-like devices in the US, my approach to communication might be less feasible.
Emails don’t bounce until they haven’t been able to be delivered for DAYs. With an “s,” so you won’t even know there is a delay until the message doesn’t even matter anymore.
When I use Instacart, everything goes through the app where I get notified. I don’t know if Instacart has the feature. But Uber/UberEats automatically translates the text to English in the app. I live in an area where there are a lot of Spanish speaking gig workers.
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.
Small biz who know their customers - this is who TCR stops.
Any legitimate business that’s actually compliant will respect opt-outs and actually stop texting after a STOP, and I seriously doubt they would actually survive if they blasted away with unsolicited a2p texting these days.
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.
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.
https://www.openmobilealliance.org/specifications/
Is probably a decent place to start
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?
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)
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
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.
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.)
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.
How about a $1/message politician surcharge?
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
Or so the theory goes
There isn’t really any reason why it can’t be that I can think of
What does PagerDuty do that makes things more appropriate? I would generally expect a middleman service to make things worse.