Forum Discussion
How to fix significant delays of messages sent using the email to SMS service?
Sprint customer here. About a month or 2 ago, I started noticing that some messages sent using the email to SMS service can be significantly delayed. I've seen messages delayed up to (and possibly over) 24 hours, but more frequently, the delay is between 10 minutes to a couple hours (when it happens).
I have an unlimited everything plan and I use the email to SMS service to send myself messages from automations on my Raspberry Pi. I pay through the nose for the service, so I figured using that just seemed like a no-brainer.
I was not having any problem with this for years prior to a couple months ago. I always received messages within moments of sending the email. I waited awhile before reaching out to Sprint/T-Mobile with this (and other) issues so that I could rule out issues on my raspberry pi. When I finally got around to sitting down and debugging, I added timestamps to all my messages and over the past week or 2, I have been seeing the difference between my timestamps and the time I received the messages.
I could of course work around this issue and use a different means of sending messages, but that's ridiculous. I *pay* for this service. It should work and it should work promptly. The past 2 days I have spent frustrated hours interacting with sprint support to figure this out and all I hear are excuses and requests to do basic cure-all debugging steps that frankly make no sense. I have no delays of regular SMS messages, nor imessages. It's restricted to email-to-sms messages, and that happens on their servers. And since I have no way of determining whether these steps have fixed the issue, since I cannot make it happen on demand, all I have asked them to do is look at my message logs over the past 15 days and compare the times they receive the emails with the times they are actually sent to my phone so I can conclusively confirm the issue. I got one upper tier tech to actually do it, via their messaging support, but I got disconnected while waiting to hear his results. I even got a message from him saying he had the results and was just reviewing them before sending me a synopsis! So frustrating! Interactions since then put me back at square one with useless debugging, despite my requests to either give me those results or do it again…
My first cell service/phone back in the early 2000s was T-Mobile and back then, I recall the support being really great. With this new experience, I can no longer say the same.
I actually (think I) solved this problem by working around it. I switched from using email-to-text to an AppleScript that tells the messages app on macOS to send the SMS.
My only concern there is that my phone may need to have either a WiFi or data connection in order for the SMS to be sent, which makes it no better than an iMessage, but from what I’ve heard, the ability to send/receive SMS without a data connection is going away with the decommissioning of the 2G network anyway.
Weird. I didn't get an email notifying me of that response (or perhaps I just missed it). I may make a proper repo, but for now, I put it in a gist.
It might or might not require the recipient to be in your contacts. I haven't fully tested it, but it works fine for sending messages to myself - and happens pretty much immediately, though I still currently have discord set up and it arrives a half a second sooner every time.
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/consumer-versus-non-consumer-text-messaging
might be some additional ideas in here.
Ha! I actually just realized I replied to you on another thread asking for the Apple Script. I already have a Mac OS VM doing some automation, so an Apple Script might work perfect for me. Do you use GitHub? That would be a good place to post it for others too
I actually (think I) solved this problem by working around it. I switched from using email-to-text to an AppleScript that tells the messages app on macOS to send the SMS.
My only concern there is that my phone may need to have either a WiFi or data connection in order for the SMS to be sent, which makes it no better than an iMessage, but from what I’ve heard, the ability to send/receive SMS without a data connection is going away with the decommissioning of the 2G network anyway.
I know this is a month old, but I use Email to Text pretty much the exact same way and my messages are being delayed as well. Sometimes by a day or more, which makes them useless.
