Forum Discussion
How to whitelist our Email to Text notifications
My non-profit foundation's domain sends messages to individuals who provide us with their text messaging address. Our non-profit has been sending their email-to-text notifications every day for years but of late, those with T-Mobile are not getting them. I'm not too technical, but researched the issue and saw on this support forum that others have had the same issue happen and the solution was to get "whitelisted". Can you help us. Do I submit a ticket, if so, how do I do that? And what information is needed? fyi...I'm a t-mobile customer and can verify my own email-to-text notifications are hard-bouncing.
We don't have any process for whitelisting external sources due to shared network configurations with spam sources. One thing that can help is to pick unique email user accounts that are not a generically shared combination with spam senders. So don't send from email addresses that start with things like noreply@ o admin@. We also use volumetric guidelines, so if you're sending out lots of messages it could still get flagged as spam. In that case, your best bet is to use a short code to send out updates to individuals.
Hi, I have this exact same issue, except we are using a monitoring service that sends us email-to-SMS alerts. Non-T-Mobile devices are able to receive those texts, so we know the issue isn't the monitoring service. The email we use to send out those alerts is "alerts@<domain>.com", which we cannot change. When there are events to be alerted on, each user registered to receive those alerts can sometimes get upwards of 20-30 in an hour. Due to budgetary restraints, we cannot change over to using short code.
Are our T-Mobile users simply out of luck? What else can be done to make sure that they receive the text alerts?
Hi, I have this exact same issue, except we are using a monitoring service that sends us email-to-SMS alerts. Non-T-Mobile devices are able to receive those texts, so we know the issue isn't the monitoring service. The email we use to send out those alerts is "alerts@<domain>.com", which we cannot change. When there are events to be alerted on, each user registered to receive those alerts can sometimes get upwards of 20-30 in an hour. Due to budgetary restraints, we cannot change over to using short code.
Are our T-Mobile users simply out of luck? What else can be done to make sure that they receive the text alerts?
We don't have any process for whitelisting external sources due to shared network configurations with spam sources. One thing that can help is to pick unique email user accounts that are not a generically shared combination with spam senders. So don't send from email addresses that start with things like noreply@ o admin@. We also use volumetric guidelines, so if you're sending out lots of messages it could still get flagged as spam. In that case, your best bet is to use a short code to send out updates to individuals.
I don't think we can do short code since our notifications are emails;
unless I don't understand short code.
Also, t-mobile has not flagged these same email-to-text messages for 12
years, why all of a sudden is my issue?
the emails start with "notification@" so I don't think that is the issue.
And perhaps I don't understand, I went to the t-mobile user forum and found
others with the same email-to-text issue and the resolution was having
t-mobile intervene somehow and fix it (whitelisting seemed to be how
t-mobile fixed it).
Any other suggestions?
[personal information removed by tmo_ian]
Starting your email with Notification@ could definitely be the problem. That's they type of generic address we're looking for when we're protecting our customers from spam. I'd definitely recommend changing that to something more personal, like MyCareConnect@ and see if that makes a difference.
We're you able to test changing the email address?
We have not yet tried this, I'm a non-profit foundation on a slim budget
and I've got to get my subcontractor/developer to do this. I'll try
tomorrow.
John & Pam Henry, Founders
The MyCareConnect Foundation
[edited by tmo_ian to remove personal information]
Seriously, this is driving us nuts. We have to send out the texts with the address our service uses, which is noreply@cteams.com. It is required for everyone to opt in for these services. Sometimes the message goes through to some users and sometimes it goes through to other users, sometimes it goes through to all. IT'S RANDOM! We also have messages that contain links to RSVP for events - the length requires it be split up into two messages. 1/2 goes through but 2/2 does not. There has got to be some kind of fix; this is ludicrous. Surely you understand that we are becoming increasingly reliant upon this traffic for communication.
I can't even send an email from my Hotmail account to my own phone. My Hotmail account is myname@hotmail.com. Where myname is replaced by my real name! I can send a text to my email. T-Mobile really needs a way to whitelist. They can block, so they should be able to whitelist.
