Email to SMS Problems

E-mail to SMS is not considered very reliable. Is there a reason you use that rather than just e-mail?

14 - 15 year old kids don't check emails.  Group Texts are annoying. It is a fast and easy way to remind kids/parents what is going on with the Scout group that day/week.

It should be reliable.  It worked perfectly, until it was blocked by Tmobile.  All of the other service providers work perfectly.

Have you tried sending the e-mails one-at-a-time? T-Mobile is pretty aggressive about blocking SPAM and your e-mail's might have been flagged as such. Also, T-Mobile used to market their E-Mail-to-text tools. They discontinued them and only left the e-mail-to-SMS system in place without much support.

Happy Sunday, @meadowsvarsity2000‌!  I just wanted to stop by and see if you'd had a chance to look over that link or test any of the suggested methods to force the message to deliver over MMS.  How is everything going with your troop communications?

- Marissa

The issue is with T-Mobile and not Barracuda Networks.  I own a text marketing company that sends over 500,000 messages per day in which 100,000 alone are to T-Mobile subscribers. Forcing MMS by creating a message longer than 160, setting the content type to "html/plain" or even including an image will only prevent T-Mobile from "repackaging" your message to a temp short-code for delivery. This will not stop the 550 permanent error. Even if you have the correct SPF, DKIM, PTR (rDNS), SMTP Banner and any extra SMTP IP A records set to your mail server, the failure will continue. What is happening is T-Mobile's SPAM filter (not Barracuda) is seeing your messages as SPAM, if you are using the same subject every time and delivering to just 100 @tmomail.net.net subscribers every 24 hours, you can be blocked permanently.  We resolved our issue by purchasing another TLD (domain) and sending mail through that channel. It was actually a good move because all of our clients access the platform/website through "example.com" but all the mail is delivered through "example-mail.com" but both domains have the same hostname/mail server name of mail.example.com. Hope this helps anyone who has had issues. Remember to use MXToolBox or DNS Stuff to check your IPs, mail server, domain, blacklist, SPF, DKIM, PTR and other records for accuracy.  For those sending a lot of messages per day it's advised you use round-robin IP sending if you have more than 1 IP on your server as well as configuring EXIM in all areas on your server both GUI and command.

No

t mo support told me that t mobile will be getting away from all Email to SMS as it is " OLD TECH"

Was a way to get this working found?  I'm also trying to send text messages for a Scouting event and text messages to my own phone number are blocked.  My code is working fine for texting a Verizon user.

I found out it was blocking my messages when it detects the same subject line every time you send your bulk messages. I guess it thinks its a spam when you send messages to many users with the same subject line.  I send my messages every week, so I change the subject line every week.  Just change the subject line after every bulk message you send. 

It is odd that TMobile does not support subscriber whitelisting the source of email to SMS messages.  If your generic SPAM filters false positive identify my messages as SPAM, I should be able to control what I'd like to receive.

TMobile is now blocking my video surveillance notifications.  This is simply denial of service.

Fix it!