T-Mobile text notification

[rick.curl]

Our cell phones are all T-Mobile, and for years my home automation system could send me text notification of events by sending an email to my 10-digit cell number @tmomail.net, but as of a few months ago that stopped working.  It may occasionally work once in a 24 hour period, but most of the time I get a bounce back "remote server temporarily unavailable". T-Mobile customer support claims everything is fine, but if I search their forums I see lots of other people are having the same problem. 

Has anyone found a workaround for this, perhaps an online service or an app with a command-line interface?

This is NOT a problem with Universal Devices software.  The whole problem is on the T-Mobile side.  

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-Rick

[paulbates]

Having retired out of the tech industry, more than once I ran into the fact that burden of proof is on us, though it shouldn't be

I would collect the links to any/all similar stories on their forum, put them in a simple email to support (or their online ticketing system) stating in writing:

"I can no longer send texts via email. It stopped working on approximately <date>.

At least X people are having difficulty sending texts via email. In the past this has worked for me for X years and recently stopped. I get this error message back: <error message>.

Review these links of other reports of this same problem,

Link 1
....
Link N

What do I want? Can you review, diagnose and advise?"

Doing this tersely, logically and written gives them something they have to resolve the same way

[dbwarner5]

Move to the Pushover Notifications Plug In. Works flawlessly. Made the move 2 years ago when ATT stopped being reliable in the same manner. 

[paulbates]

12 minutes ago, dbwarner5 said:

Move to the Pushover Notifications Plug In. Works flawlessly. Made the move 2 years ago when ATT stopped being reliable in the same manner. 

👆100% .. or the notification plugin which can also do pushover.. One of those notifications service is more reliable and capable

Edited January 14 by paulbates

[Geddy]

7 hours ago, rick.curl said:

The whole problem is on the T-Mobile side.  

Sorry...the "problem" is the industry. Nearly all mobile providers have long been blocking/limiting/slowing email to SMS type communication. It's been a long discussed topic on the forums. AT&T and VZW were among the worst offenders early on, but seems like they all do it now. 

The best option is to not use that method (that's always been the answer). As @dbwarner5 suggests using the Notification plugin and Pushover or UD Mobile alerts is the best bet for mobile notifications. 

I would suggest you see this post by @Kentinada for help setting things up. He just went through the process and asked a lot of great questions and documented what he did and what worked (or didn't work) for his needs.

His whole experience resulted from exactly the same issue of not getting alerts via text being on T-Mobile.

 

Complaining to T-Mobile won't get you very far. It's an industry wide issue that's only getting worse. 

Take a look at:  https://www.campaignregistry.com/

There's a huge push to require any system/company that uses text messaging to register and pay a per use or campaign process. It is a small step in the big carriers trying to limit unfiltered access to email to SMS ability to try to limit the spam. 

Sadly, I just wished it worked. I'm so sick of endless spam texts from junk senders. Only going to get worse during the election cycle. 

[rick.curl]

4 hours ago, dbwarner5 said:

Move to the Pushover Notifications Plug In. Works flawlessly. Made the move 2 years ago when ATT stopped being reliable in the same manner. 

Wow!  Just what I was looking for.  Pushover is already set up and running. Thanks for the suggestion!

I see this is also possible with Pushbullet, which I am already running. I may go back and tinker with the Pushbullet command line interface later.

Thanks again! 

-Rick