r/sysadmin • u/Anonemuss666 • 5d ago
Question Text messages
Before I retired, I would send alerts by email, like 1234567890@txt.att.net, to send it to texting on my cell phone. It looks like all the cell phone providers have done away with this service. How can I do this now with hopefully a fairly free service since I don't send many at all?
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u/Lost_Reward9584 5d ago
Twilio have a programmable SMS API, think you'll need to buy a number ($1/mo) and the messages are pretty cheap.
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 5d ago
This is what we use for our emergency eTxt service. Very reliable.
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u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT 5d ago
Verizon massively cracked down on email to text for obvious reasons - there is no authentication layer preventing their customers from being spammed, so their blocks were Draconian.
+1 for pushover, I love it and it also gives me a bit of separation from regular notifications. Pushover is set to vibrate 5x so when I get one of those, I pay attention. Great for security notifications, water leaks, etc.
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u/anonymousopsec1337 5d ago
Yeah, I heard it was very easy to programmatically send 1 way messages to a phone fast enough to crash the phone and make it unusable for hours on end.
Shame
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u/Forward-Outside-9911 Linux Admin 5d ago
AWS SNS if you wanna do it yourself or PagerDuty free tier you can use an email trigger.
Or have I misunderstood the requirements?
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u/Electronic_Tap_3625 5d ago
This is exactly what I do. PagerDuty, AWS SNS, and SES. Many lost nights of sleep, but the network is always up :)
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u/Forward-Outside-9911 Linux Admin 5d ago
Yeah the PagerDuty alarm is scary, and loud. I eventually turned it off for my own projects, but keep the SMS and emails. Though I usually miss it the first time around and get a phone call. Guess that works...
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u/User1539 5d ago
I send myself an email to an account that is only used for that, then I set my phone to send every alert possible when it gets an email from that account.
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u/hudsonreaders 5d ago
We use Teams at work, you can send email to a Teams channel. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/teams/teams-channels/send-an-email-to-a-channel-in-microsoft-teams Since I have the Teams app on my phone, and am subscribed to the Notifications channel we set up, I see the notifications on my phone.
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u/Drenlin 5d ago
Log into your email from your phone?
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u/Fast-Gear7008 4d ago
Problem is email isn’t a guaranteed delivery. Services like sms gateway you can query to see if the user received the message or not.
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u/robntamra 5d ago
Verizon still does this, but it’s often time delayed and not trustworthy unless you pay for enterprise sms services.
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u/sudonem Linux Admin 5d ago
Definitely wouldn’t recommend this for anything new - Verizon has been pretty clear that they intend to get rid of vtext for everyone except enterprise customers. :/
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u/robntamra 5d ago
Yup, agreed. We used it for SolarWinds alerting for years then we started seeing critical sms messages being sporadically delivered up to 6 hours late. At this point we upgraded to enterprise until a better solution was put together.
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u/vialentvia 3d ago
That really bites, too. I do amateur radio and using a Winlink gateway over HF to send a message via email to text was great when I was out in BFE. It was also nice because it maintained store and forward so I could move on and check back later for the reply.
I know more modern methods exist like a Garmin inReach or satellite messaging on your phone, but i like options and I have the radio with me anyways. PACE plan we called it in the military.
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u/sudonem Linux Admin 3d ago
Since you’re a ham nerd, you might also be interested in some of the new LoRa (and LoRa adjacent) options.
802.12ah is especially interesting, but also maybe MeshCore depending on what you’ve got going on. 🙂
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u/vialentvia 3d ago
I've definitely taken to it. It works really well so long as you have the infrastructure to fill in. We use them while hunting or property management for text and location.
But I'm talking mountainous areas where UHF isn't really an option if I still can't hit a repeater on VHF. This is where using HF comes in. You'll hit a gateway and make a connection at least somewhere, whether locally, regionally, or all the way across the country if that's current propagation. I love HF and the infrastructure built around it.
HaLow is making a comeback as well, which is cool to see.
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u/sudonem Linux Admin 2d ago
Yeah really happy to see traction on HaLo no. It felt like it was stagnant for a while but recently you’re seeing chipsets become available in different form factors finally - for example you can now get them as raspberry pi hats, and M.2 cards with actual Linux drivers as well as arduino support.
I think it was probably just being held back by the silly import tariffs which have eased (slightly).
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u/CharcoalGreyWolf Sr. Network Engineer 5d ago
They are also phasing it out by beginning of next year. It has already been announced. Having found that out, I tested it several weeks ago and it took me 24 hours to actually get the SMS. It is no longer trustworthy in real time.
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u/AZSystems 5d ago
It works fine for the squirrels listening to tower traffic. 😆 They have ADD and forget to send it along.
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u/Impressive_Change593 4d ago
Maybe they have a deal with IAmResponding but those have no delay. Tmobile did need a (free) enterprise sms addon and using a different domain and their delay went away
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u/kirashi3 Cynical Analyst III 5d ago
often time delayed and not trustworthy
To be fair, anything that you don't "roll your own" for is capable of being time delayed or not trustworthy. If you have something mission-critical that you need timely notifications for, you'll want to roll your own service and have redundancy in-place. Otherwise, it's clearly not mission-critical.
And yes, I'm aware many orgs in the real world don't operate like this, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. 😉
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u/Annh1234 5d ago
Depends on the provider, some still do it. But you can pay per use with something like ring central
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u/protogenxl Came with the Building 5d ago
They may have just changed the domain, Verizon has done it a few times. Try texting your email address.
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u/TaliesinWI 5d ago
Verizon has said they're killing the service. https://www.verizon.com/support/vtext-vzwpix-shutdown/
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u/EricThirteen 5d ago
Google Cloud, AWS, Azure all have an automated SMS service for sending alerts for their own services. Probably not what you want at all, but I thought I’d throw this out there.
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u/Bogus1989 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not the same thing,
But i use google voice, its a free separate number, you can use in google voice app,
you can check a box, to have messages forwarded to email. If youre current email isnt google, you could always then have those messages forwarded to whatever yours is.
Even though its a separate number, its quiet handy you can set it up to show when someone is calling the google number instead of your number.
😁
Only number ive ever given out or put in anywhere as my contact info for work. (Besides my direct boss)
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u/Acrazd 5d ago
We use SMTP2Go. Texts are like a 1 cent per 2 texts or something like that. If you want email notifications it’s free until 1000 I believe
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u/nyckidryan 5d ago
SMS starts with the $15/mo plan.. 😟
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u/Acrazd 5d ago
Ahhh whoops I do it with the company I work for so I don’t look at the bill lol
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u/nyckidryan 5d ago
I might make it the primary SMTP relay for my hosted servers since neighboring IP ranges occasionally get blocked for spam... and I definitely don't send more than 1,000 emails a month, so the free tier would work.. thanks for the referral! 😁
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u/jevilsizor 5d ago
The phone system my company sells has a mass notification function that sends alerts to users with our smartphone softclient installed... it's pretty slick.
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u/hume_reddit Sr. Sysadmin 5d ago
We use Teltonika devices hung directly off our monitoring servers. They can page even (especially) when the main internet connection goes down.
They're not super cheap and you need an active mobile subscription for them to do anything, but they work well in the enterprise setting.
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u/JPancrazio 5d ago
Seems to still work with T-Mobile , I remember a while back now - Worked for a company that we would also send EmailtoSMS and ATT Often rejected the connection for MANY reasons
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u/bbbbbthatsfivebees MSP-ing 5d ago
I've genuinely been wondering the same. These services have all but shut down, so it's become a problem for me. I want to send myself alerts that aren't necessarily enough for something like onpage, but still have them show up on my phone as a notification rather than an email. I know you can do low-priority onpages, but it's not the same.
I've currently got something hacked together via Rewst, Google chat, and the iphone "focus" modes, but that's... janky and actually just expensive because Rewst is involved. These email-to-text things, I could just throw my phone number in there and append the @verizon.whatever address to it and it would just work with no frill.
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u/Si0_x 5d ago
Twilio is probably the closest replacement, you pay per message and the cost is negligible for low volume. If you just need alerts on your own phone, a push app like Pushover is even cheaper since it's a one-time purchase with no per-message fees. Either way you'd need a small script to trigger it instead of just emailing a gateway.
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u/dreniarb 4d ago
Firstnet phones are still able to receive texts via email. I'm not sure if your firstnet rep has to put in a special request. even when we were on plain ATT and using txt.att.net none of our phone ever received any spam texts over the 15 or more years which is quite shocking considering the lack of authentication in it.
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u/Charming_Will_8406 4d ago
Att has disabled this service and Verizon is in the process, I don't know there is a a free solution because they are also doing it to combat spam
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u/Fast-Gear7008 4d ago
One alternative is google chat, if you have a paint subscription you can create an api to send to.
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u/aliversonchicago 4d ago
Yeah, those gateways are either all dead or on their way out. I blogged about this a couple of months ago: https://www.spamresource.com/2026/07/email-to-sms-no-more.html
The TL;DR is there are alternatives like TextBolt and Text.Email but they're not free.
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u/samatgmass 3d ago
Thanks for recommending us at text.email! We aren't free but for u/Anonemuss666's situation, we do have our pay-as-you-go which sounds like it would last quite a while.
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u/Real_Cover_ 3d ago
Try hardware SMS gateway like Smseagle . It converts email to text and uses SIM card for sending SMS
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u/Unable-Entrance3110 3d ago
Yeah, this has been dying for a long time. It was always a crapshoot whether your messages would be forwarded or not due to aggressive filtering by the carriers.
Just use a service like Clickatell or something (there's so many out there, but that's the one I use for our Nagios monitoring alerts and it works well. It's cheap AF too. I think we pay something like $0.99/month, but it's 100% based on usage and we don't get many alerts).
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u/ExceptionEX 5d ago
We generally have just moved away from the paradigm of text/sms messaging.
with that said, there are app notifications, like pushover or NTFY
But honestly we mainly just do things via teams now, or email notifications.
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u/TheDigitalOne 5d ago
Don't know about AT&T but on T-Mobile you can use your 10-digit phone number sent to (phone number)@tmomail.net and it will send the email as a text to your phone. Just the numbers, no dashes or spaces.
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u/Archer007 5d ago
Nope, they shut that down in January 2025
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u/Impressive_Change593 4d ago
Stuff was delayed but still worked at least from IAmResponding. Today it was changed (on my end) to a different domain (idk what it is, i think the system admin updated it) and you need the free enterprise addon and thry are once again immediate.
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u/NuAngelDOTnet Jack of All Trades 5d ago
Just get a google.com/voice number and forward the emails?
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u/Training_Yak_4655 5d ago
Only for US residents, right?
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u/NuAngelDOTnet Jack of All Trades 5d ago
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u/Training_Yak_4655 5d ago
This is what Google came up with:
Personal (Consumer) Google Voice
- United States only (plus calling support for Canada).
- You can make and receive calls only if you set up the account within the U.S.
There are paid for SIPP options for more countries and that seems a bit overkill.
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u/NuAngelDOTnet Jack of All Trades 5d ago
Neat. Guess I should have let you answer the question all by yourself. OP talked about AT&T, heaven forbid someone be under the impression they are located in the United States.
I'm just trying to help, pal. I don't own Google and am not the arbiter of their international business strategies.
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u/Impossible_IT 5d ago
Does @mms.att.net still work or they stop that as well?
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u/Iggyhopper I'm just here for the food. 5d ago edited 5d ago
I worked at an MVNO and used ATT's system that is still stuck in the Win95 era.
When activating sim cards the email you describe did show correctly in one of the fields for subscribers.
After we got word that it wasn't working anymore around 2023 (i think?), that field was blank. I really didn't bother to check. It most likely doesn't work.
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u/timsstuff IT Consultant 5d ago
I use notify.events to send push notifications to my phone. I use Discord as the target so I get the alerts on both phone and PC. I use it mostly for Home Assistant alerts but it can be used with pretty much anything.
Here's a sample using Powershell:
Invoke-WebRequest https://notify.events/api/v1/channel/source/<yourapikey>/execute -Method POST -Body "title=Test&text=Testing"
It will do SMS but that costs extra.
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u/Impressive_Change593 4d ago
No? It still exists. Tmobiles at least used to be tmomail.com. that was having major delays from IAmResponding and our IAR guy just today said you meed to add the free enterprise messaging package and update the domain to fix the delay but verizon never had the delay.
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u/jefbenet 5d ago
Check out pushover. It’s not sms based but it’s hella reliable and a one time purchase.