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.
contact them through one of their social media platforms instead. you start with a higher tier support over calling in.
I called 611 and spoke to a support rep. In my use case, the email is being sent to ###@tmomail.net for business notifications. It turns out that this gateway is being exploited by spammers to send bulk email, so T-Mobile has installed a spam filter, which can fall behind. Some takeaways:
- Filtering was installed recently, around July.
- Migrate to short codes, it is better supported.
- Methods for authenticating Email (to avoid getting caught in spam filters) won’t prevent it from being scanned.
- If spam levels decrease, the service should become more responsive.
- This method of sending SMS is considered unsupported.
Hope this helps folks.
Update after calling 611. Got some useful information. In my use case, the SMS is sent through an email gateway. Unfortunately, spammers are using this facility to spam general users, so TMobile has implemented a filter. Here were takeaways.
- Use a short code to send SMS (this is supported; the email gateway is best efforts).
- When spam volume subsides, delays should reduce.
- Signatures, etc in email headers do not help make it past the screening process any faster. The spam screens will still inspect the messages, which can take some time.
This article explains what is happening (in my case my home security intrusion alerts are never delivered), and even says “The e-mail to text gateway is a legacy system that may eventually be decommissioned in the future.”
It also says “Hay una variedad de compañías respetadas independientes que ofrecen servicios de mensajería en la vía sancionada que quizás puedan ayudarte. We recommend you reach out to Kaleyra, Infobip, Sinch, Vibes Media, Twilio, or Cisco directly.”
What it doesn't say is that, as far as I can tell, each one of these services sends messages via a (programmatic) API or a web interface. There is no email-to-text interface available (you cannot just send your message to somewhere other than tmomail.net)
So, if your messages are generated by your home security, or other, system then the developers of those systems need to add capabilities to utilize the “paths” that T Mobile accepts.
It will not be simple to switch. If you are relying upon T Mobile to deliver SMS/MMS texts to your phone you should probably be looking elsewhere, or convince your system's developers to add additional SMS/MMS delivery methods.
Actually, there is a simple solution. Use the $5 app, Pushover, to send notifications to your phone. Search ipcamtalk.com and you'll find detailed explanations of what to do.
