Major carriers are increasingly hostile to SMS that don't originate from one of their customers' handset.
Killing off this gateway cuts off an avenue of escape that people might use to avoid TCR.
If you haven't heard of TCR, you should check it out because it is negatively impacting you somewhere.
Overseen by TMobile, The Campaign Registry is a pay-to-play scheme that applies to everyone who wants to send SMS to a ATT/TM/Vz user.
To onboard with TCR, applicants have to:
1) pay up front and pay more and then pay forever
2) jump thru needlessly complicated hoops (that become ever-moving goalposts for small biz and end users).
3) wait weeks->months then GOTO 2 again. And again.
The end result is more and more biz, MNVOs, orgs, etc are abandoning SMS. Trying to comply with TCR is too big a resource-sink for them.
Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages. I can count on one hand the number of non humans I want to have the ability to send me a text and if this makes spamming financially impossible, I’m willing to deal with the baby getting tossed with the bathwater. There’s nothing so urgent I need from a small business that it can’t be either an email or a text from an employee instead of an automated system.
Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email when most/all phones, even brick phones now a days, have internet? SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email. It made sense back before basically every plan had a high/no limit internet plan, but now..?
The only real positive, so far as I can see, is the 'instantaneous' send/receive, but again thanks to big plans now a days your email checking every 5 seconds or whatever is basically free, making that benefit more of a technicality than reality.
> SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email.
You can't port email addresses unless you own the domain. For the majority of people SMS is the more portable option because they can freely port their phone number to a different carrier.
"portability" probably refers to being able to access messages from multiple devices, which can be easily done on email but not text messages. People port their phone numbers to get a better plan, but that's rarely done for email. At best there's a handful of privacy conscious people switching gmail for protonmail or whatever.
Everyone just uses Gmail/Hotmail/iCloud/Proton which just don't have the port problem as carriers because you don't have any reason to port since there's no fees and no physical network, you can just accrue more and use mail forwarding with no problem.
that's another cost, have fun getting your emails dropped by microsoft because they don't like your ip addresses unless you pay someone else to send for you
Because to check email your active participation is needed so you must start an application while to accept texting no such action is needed. Thus for short information (read-and-forget) short messaging (SMS or RCS) is more convenient. Of course, you could use a specialized application to check your email account and filter those needing immediate notification, but if such a service is already available what is the reason to generate additional much bigger traffic?
I don't understand where you're coming from here. Both Android and iPhone automatically and passively check emails simulating real time connectivity akin to a messenger. What you said does apply to desktop, but comparing SMS to desktop email is rather odd to say the least.
1. There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses. 90%+ of it is probably 2FA codes anyway, and the rest is tied to some potential transaction.
For the latter, SMS costing even 100x more as normal is irrelevant - we're talking about spending extra $0.1 on confirmation and reminders on a $50+ service (hairdresser, tire change, vet appointment, doc appointment, whatever) - so it shouldn't be disturbing to actual voluntary business between two consenting parties.
2. There's a fuck ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".
Fortunately, I live in Europe; thanks to GDPR, they don't dare. Except for PV solar peddlers and Bitcoin scams, which have a special place in hell ready for them - and MLM people, which are already in hell, but don't realize it.
Nah. SMS in its terminal stage after losing battle with advertising cancer[0]. There's no point in even trying to save or resurrect it without first getting rid of the sickness - marketing communications.
> 2. There's a frak ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".
Good because none of them are bulk sending sms spam. Or likely sending any biz SMS thanks to TCR.
Meanwhile the actual bulk senders of SMS are happily firehosing it to millions of phones, thanks to the protections they purchase - also thanks to TCR.
> There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses.
In total SMS sure. And those corps that send the 90% pay TCR so they can keep sending that unwanted SMS. TCR is a good fit for the biggest spammers.
Conversely, 100% of the SMS I send to my customers are wanted; they pay to support them and SMS is how they want that to happen.
My customers have their own customers - who also want to comm using SMS.
For us, TCR has mostly killed off our SMS access to ur customers. None of my MNVO lines carry SMS any longer, because of the onerous TCR compliance burdens.
Likewise my clients can no longer SMS their customers - even though it has long been an expected part of their relationship.
To recap:
1) TCR harms small biz who send wanted, necessary and consensual SMS.
2) TCR also protect bulk senders of unwanted SMS senders, because they have paid for that protection.
Vigorously throwing shade at 1 while voicing no meaningful objection to 2 seems like an unfortunate position.
Just because an SMS originates from a computer does not make it spam. I like to be notified that my drive up order is ready or for a link to check in at the doctor.
That's why making each message costly is the way to go - it's not discriminating on what or how sent the message, it just forces sending to scale no faster than actual service of the business. A text or two per delivery or a doctors' visit is still a rounding error compared to costs of the transaction itself, but casually spamming hundreds of thousands of people becomes a noticeable cost.
You're right. Just the other day I got this annoying spam message from my local pharmacy - "your prescription is ready for pick up". Why would I want that? And my hairdresser too? "Reminder: you have an appointment tomorrow at 10AM" wow they'll send anything to try to get my business.
If these were legit businesses, they would send it to my email so it can be listed with all the GeekSquad invoices I receive from Gmail addresses. Of course, because everyone is just like the average HN user, they know how to set up intricate filters to prioritize the GeekSquad invoices.
> You're right. Just the other day I got this annoying spam message from my local pharmacy
Right. That's who TCR doesn't stop.
But lets say you buy a DIY home upgrade from a local biz and the two of you are in a support session and are sending pics and messages back and forth over SMS.
When your car is ready to be picked up from a repair.
When your table is ready.
When you want to schedule an appointment.
When your groceries are ready to be picked up/have things missing.
And so on.
When my car is ready to be picked up - they call me. Even if I just let it go to voicemail, I still get a real time transcription.
When I use Instacart, everything goes through the app where I get notified. I don’t know if Instacart has the feature. But Uber/UberEats automatically translates the text to English in the app. I live in an area where there are a lot of Spanish speaking gig workers.
I disagree. The vast majority of emails I get don't trigger a notification, as I get over a hundred non-spam emails a day. These are high priority things, so that notification coming in through a higher priority notification process makes sense.
Email isn’t instant. It is usually delayed by 30-40s, but quite often gets into the 20-30 minutes range. Hell, a few weeks ago it took 6 hours to get the login verification emails for my epic games account and couldn’t login.
Emails don’t bounce until they haven’t been able to be delivered for DAYs. With an “s,” so you won’t even know there is a delay until the message doesn’t even matter anymore.
I don't want to be online on my phone, except when I decide that I want to browse the Web because I have spare time or need some information. SMS is perfect when I want someone to reach me in a timely manner.
Well, luckily I live in country where SMS spam is not an issue. If I look at the inbox of our IoT-like devices in the US, my approach to communication might be less feasible.
It's about years of routine communication between a business and it's own customers that stops. Like my clients who had to stop providing product support over SMS - even tho that what their customers prefer.
It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose.
SMS spam continues to flow. Legit traffic is cut off unless the ransom is paid.
If employees are all using softphones (like my client), purchasing cell phones for each employee adds expense and the complication of a 2nd phone number.
Expense and complexity are also the primary problems with TCR.
Well actually I know a little something about this. One of my specialties within the AWS consulting space is implementing Amazon Connect call centers solutions that involve SMS.
It takes awhile. But I’ve never had a customer complain about SMS messages going through
And this was the original use case I was referring to
> It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose
SMS spam hasn't stopped. I still get it. What TCR stops is legit SMS traffic. SMS that is wanted - and sometimes needed - by the people who receive it.
Small biz and their own customers is who TCR stops communicating.
Big biz pays for TCR compliance and they blast out SMS like they always have.
Which big mass spammers are you thinking of? The only ones I can think of are political campaigns; scams obviously can’t be compliant at all. And even political campaigns are having to switch providers once or twice a year since they generate over 90% of spam reports and don’t actually bother with even opt-out compliance.
Any legitimate business that’s actually compliant will respect opt-outs and actually stop texting after a STOP, and I seriously doubt they would actually survive if they blasted away with unsolicited a2p texting these days.
I’d rather get an email from them. At least with email I have a multitude of spam detection and filtering tools that just don’t exist for SMS text messages.
If you're looking for a way to programmatically get messages to your phone I recommend Pushover. It's reasonably priced ($5 one time purchase for individuals) and it's run by a solo dev.
Oh, yikes. I’ve come to rely on the email->sms gateway from AT&T. I’ve had they set up a s a forwarding address within my web mail for a few years now, and have filters which forward matching messages as SMS to my phone.
The formatting is often quite lousy but it’s enough to send me a nudge to check my email for a message from the library, a job I applied for, or whatever.
I wouldn’t have heard about this about it being posted here, so thank you!
Why not just have notifications only for that filter? I get not checking emails, I get so many that anything important is just ignored along with all of the other crap but if you already have a good filter, just use that.
Oh I’ve gotten weird about email, for sure — but this is more of an example of “the prototype goes to production”.
I put these filters in place long before iPhones were a thing, and when the only devices that supported push notifications were BlackBerry (maybe? I didn’t have one) and pagers.
In the early 2000s if I wanted to be notified to go home and check my email for something important, the email->sms gateway was really my only option.
I feel as if alternative solutions are costly and can price out small businesses from messaging customers.
My local public library uses email to text to send messages about overdue books. While they don't develop their catalog system, I believe that using things like Twilio is costly, and I hope their upstream catalog provider isn't unduly burdened by this. I contract for a small company and we switched to email notifications exclusively since SMS was too expensive.
Maybe this says something about how SMS is the wrong platform to be using, but it looks like business WhatsApp messaging costs money too. I've never recieved spam over email to text.
I miss having a carrier that had a dialup modem TAP server. As long as I had power, it was almost certain that the phone lines would also be up, and I could make a POTS call to send an alert. That was super convenient.
MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.
Since the FCC abdicated their regulatory power over texting during the first Trump administration under Ajit Pai, T-Mobile, AT&T & Verizon Wireless formed a cartel called The Campaign Registry which has run amok extorting data and cash out of businesses just to be allowed to go through a slow approval process.
Nominally, this was to reduce spam texts, but the vast majority of spam texts are internal to the Mobile Network Operators these days.
I think it's a little overstated to call tcr a cartel. Yes, it's a process, but it's gotten a lot better over the last 18 months.
People have been complaining about spam text for a long time. There aren't too many folks out there clamouring for anyone to be able to send them an SMS via email gateway.
For the past decade I've been shocked that email to sms was still allowed. sure, there are some legitimate organizations that have been using this route to avoid cost. But the whole idea is that if it's not worth 1 penny to send this message, then sms probably isn't the right channel.
Where do you get the data about spam texts being internal to MNOs these days? I keep track of the ones I receive and they're almost all going through third party companies that are themselves sending through Twilio, Bandwidth, Sinch, etc. This makes perfect sense to me given what I know of the market and how spammers operate.
Manually. My MNO does pretty aggressive blocking, so I only have about 1/week to deal with. That's low enough that I report them manually rather than try to automate the constantly changing reporting process or deal with app development. The response is almost always some variation on "We've forwarded your report to the network we received it from".
I don't really get SMS/MMS. It made tons of sense in the 90s when we were all on our little Nokia.
Now, every device is internet connected. Email arrives in an instant. Whatsapp/Viber/FB Messenger exist and all provide a way better experience. RCS, 2 decades late, is like an april fools joke. Why are we still using this?
It's an incorrect statement. An MMS is delivered by sending an SMS to the recipient phone and the phone fetching the message via http. Very unlike SMTP.
Not sure the future of SMS in my life, but dang for whatever reason, people still want to use it.
I don't have as much need for email-=>sms gateways, but what about the other way? I much prefer to handle comms on my desktop, and presently I use google voice for SMS. It leaves plenty to be desired, though. Are there better alternatives?
Yes. It's because the Messages UI conflates iMessage groups (blue bubbles) with SMS/MMS/RCS groups (green bubbles), combined with the fact that you can iMessage an Apple user using either their phone number or any email address they have enabled for iMessaging.
So say you start a group message to Apple users. You add type their names and don't pay attention to whether Messages is using their phone number or email address to add them to the group. (Even worse, after you're done typing their name, Messages only shows the name so you can't even tell how they've been added w/o taping their name again.)
Now, when it's an iMessage group (blue bubbles), it doesn't matter how you added them.
But as soon as you add a non-Apple user, it becomes an SMS/MMS/RCS group (green bubbles).
Guess what happens to the Apple users who were added by email address? That's right, they get emails.
There's no indication whatsoever to anyone in the group that this is happening. And as a member of the group, you can't fix how you were added. The message group has to be abandoned and a new group needs to be created using only phone numbers.
It's a terrible UI. I've been dealing with it for years because originally I used Google Voice and there's both Apple and Android users in my extended family. But even after I finally ported my number over to my phone, my extended family still sometimes adds me to SMS/MMS/RCS groups using my email address.
(Why don't we just use WhatsApp you ask? Oh, we use that too. With varying degrees of technical literacy, we end up using all the things.)
Could it be that the person has the email address saved as the default contact method in their contacts?
For a bit of time I had no cell service, but people could use Messages to send to my email address for my iCloud account. Once cell service was restored to the device, messages from one person always came addressed to the email while everyone else reverted to the phone number. I just assumed that this person's contacts listing for me was updated, or possibly even a separate contact using just my email???? I never figured it out/confirmed it either
They talked about it on the accidental tech podcast years ago when someone emailed him with the solution to this problem which one of the hosts was having.
I’ve tried searching but I’m unable to find which episode it was since search engines don’t work anymore.
So here’s what I think it might be based on what little I remember. When messages you’re sending are going to the wrong address, I think what you…
1. Tap the contact pic at the top of the iMessage thread
2. On the first row of buttons, tap the far right “info” button with a generic contact poster icon
3. Tap the “message” link
4. All their iMessage addresses will pop up, choose the one you want to use
I think that might “move” the thread to the right place.
I know in your case it sounds like it’s the other party who would need to do this. If this doesn’t actually do anything or create a second thread, I’m sorry. I know there’s a way I just don’t remember it if it’s not the above.
I think a penny is about the right price. What are the other options and how are those working?
50 percent of email is spam and Gmail has had to create multiple invoices to segment the emails that are probably not going to be read.
Snail mail is probably $1 to send something that will likely be thrown out.
Phone calls - we're rounding the corner after the days of auto insurance calls. But the behavior of only answering known callers might be here to stay.
Sms is the best channel at enforcing opt-in and if it's not worth $0.01 to reach me with the message, sms probably isn't the right channel
> If your city has 20,000 people sign up for text alerts, each alert you send is going to cost you $200
The city texts are fine, but you can see during campaign season that $0.01 is WAY WAY below their per-voter spend for their ad campaigns. I get texts from everybody in the race, even "thank you, I'm doing great, please re-elect me" texts from incumbents.
...what will spammers do? Tune in now, as desperate scammers polish resumes. "Skilled at bypassing filters and reaching millions with urgent inheritances seeks new opportunity." Local carrier pigeons reportedly terrified.
Not just the spammers, but the companies that still use it to send page outs to their employee's personal phones rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means. Won't somebody at AT&T think of these poor souls?
There’s been a leading theory that Twilio has turned a big blind eye to misuse of the their platform for sending spam. They have all these clauses, rules etc sure; they make a good show of it, but they are really slow for example to close loopholes, if at all. They’ve done a good job of making the whole thing look like they take it seriously while being clever enough to leave loopholes and obvious workarounds to anyone who knows where to look
Drop a decent enough spend and they will look away for a while. Open an account with a burner gmail and test out the api using free credits - shut down within the hour.
Major carriers are increasingly hostile to SMS that don't originate from one of their customers' handset.
Killing off this gateway cuts off an avenue of escape that people might use to avoid TCR.
If you haven't heard of TCR, you should check it out because it is negatively impacting you somewhere.
Overseen by TMobile, The Campaign Registry is a pay-to-play scheme that applies to everyone who wants to send SMS to a ATT/TM/Vz user.
To onboard with TCR, applicants have to:
The end result is more and more biz, MNVOs, orgs, etc are abandoning SMS. Trying to comply with TCR is too big a resource-sink for them.Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages. I can count on one hand the number of non humans I want to have the ability to send me a text and if this makes spamming financially impossible, I’m willing to deal with the baby getting tossed with the bathwater. There’s nothing so urgent I need from a small business that it can’t be either an email or a text from an employee instead of an automated system.
> Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages
SMS spam continues to flow. Largely from mass senders who can afford the compliance.
Legit SMS from small biz can't afford the cash and headaches.
Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email when most/all phones, even brick phones now a days, have internet? SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email. It made sense back before basically every plan had a high/no limit internet plan, but now..?
The only real positive, so far as I can see, is the 'instantaneous' send/receive, but again thanks to big plans now a days your email checking every 5 seconds or whatever is basically free, making that benefit more of a technicality than reality.
> SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email.
You can't port email addresses unless you own the domain. For the majority of people SMS is the more portable option because they can freely port their phone number to a different carrier.
"portability" probably refers to being able to access messages from multiple devices, which can be easily done on email but not text messages. People port their phone numbers to get a better plan, but that's rarely done for email. At best there's a handful of privacy conscious people switching gmail for protonmail or whatever.
Everyone just uses Gmail/Hotmail/iCloud/Proton which just don't have the port problem as carriers because you don't have any reason to port since there's no fees and no physical network, you can just accrue more and use mail forwarding with no problem.
that's another cost, have fun getting your emails dropped by microsoft because they don't like your ip addresses unless you pay someone else to send for you
I can always access my email if I have a computer and internet. I cannot access my SMS without my phone. Which, with the sudden battery swelling...
FWIW, this is why I always travel with a spare phone, especially if out of the country.
I've had my laptops battery swell more than any phone
Because to check email your active participation is needed so you must start an application while to accept texting no such action is needed. Thus for short information (read-and-forget) short messaging (SMS or RCS) is more convenient. Of course, you could use a specialized application to check your email account and filter those needing immediate notification, but if such a service is already available what is the reason to generate additional much bigger traffic?
I don't understand where you're coming from here. Both Android and iPhone automatically and passively check emails simulating real time connectivity akin to a messenger. What you said does apply to desktop, but comparing SMS to desktop email is rather odd to say the least.
> Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email
Because doing me doing tech support over SMS often flows much better than email.
That's one reason but there are a lot.
SMS is lightweight and crazy reliable. You can count on getting text messages when Internet is unavailable.
iOS doesn’t support email encryption. My provider(mailbox.org) offers an option to automatically encrypt all incoming email.
Why would I want small businesses to be able to spam me as well the large ones? I’d prefer no one does, but less is better than more.
> Why would I want small businesses to be able to spam me as well the large ones? I’d prefer no one does, but less is better than more.
For the sake of discussion, let's accept that Dumbutt Inc, of Pikesnot MN is sending out actual sms spam.
Instead of ending the wanted SMS comms between millions of customers and the business they depend on,
how about the recipient of a Dumbutt Inc spam just give them a call tell them to knock it off?
I'll do it myself if it means un-crippling wanted SMS comms.
Because:
1. There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses. 90%+ of it is probably 2FA codes anyway, and the rest is tied to some potential transaction.
For the latter, SMS costing even 100x more as normal is irrelevant - we're talking about spending extra $0.1 on confirmation and reminders on a $50+ service (hairdresser, tire change, vet appointment, doc appointment, whatever) - so it shouldn't be disturbing to actual voluntary business between two consenting parties.
2. There's a fuck ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".
Fortunately, I live in Europe; thanks to GDPR, they don't dare. Except for PV solar peddlers and Bitcoin scams, which have a special place in hell ready for them - and MLM people, which are already in hell, but don't realize it.
Nah. SMS in its terminal stage after losing battle with advertising cancer[0]. There's no point in even trying to save or resurrect it without first getting rid of the sickness - marketing communications.
--
[0] - https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
> 2. There's a frak ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".
Good because none of them are bulk sending sms spam. Or likely sending any biz SMS thanks to TCR.
Meanwhile the actual bulk senders of SMS are happily firehosing it to millions of phones, thanks to the protections they purchase - also thanks to TCR.
> There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses.
In total SMS sure. And those corps that send the 90% pay TCR so they can keep sending that unwanted SMS. TCR is a good fit for the biggest spammers.
Conversely, 100% of the SMS I send to my customers are wanted; they pay to support them and SMS is how they want that to happen.
My customers have their own customers - who also want to comm using SMS.
For us, TCR has mostly killed off our SMS access to ur customers. None of my MNVO lines carry SMS any longer, because of the onerous TCR compliance burdens.
Likewise my clients can no longer SMS their customers - even though it has long been an expected part of their relationship.
To recap:
1) TCR harms small biz who send wanted, necessary and consensual SMS.
2) TCR also protect bulk senders of unwanted SMS senders, because they have paid for that protection.
Vigorously throwing shade at 1 while voicing no meaningful objection to 2 seems like an unfortunate position.
Just because an SMS originates from a computer does not make it spam. I like to be notified that my drive up order is ready or for a link to check in at the doctor.
That's why making each message costly is the way to go - it's not discriminating on what or how sent the message, it just forces sending to scale no faster than actual service of the business. A text or two per delivery or a doctors' visit is still a rounding error compared to costs of the transaction itself, but casually spamming hundreds of thousands of people becomes a noticeable cost.
You're right. Just the other day I got this annoying spam message from my local pharmacy - "your prescription is ready for pick up". Why would I want that? And my hairdresser too? "Reminder: you have an appointment tomorrow at 10AM" wow they'll send anything to try to get my business.
If these were legit businesses, they would send it to my email so it can be listed with all the GeekSquad invoices I receive from Gmail addresses. Of course, because everyone is just like the average HN user, they know how to set up intricate filters to prioritize the GeekSquad invoices.
> You're right. Just the other day I got this annoying spam message from my local pharmacy
Right. That's who TCR doesn't stop.
But lets say you buy a DIY home upgrade from a local biz and the two of you are in a support session and are sending pics and messages back and forth over SMS.
This is what TCR stops.
If it’s a small business, they would probably be using a real cell phone and that wouldn’t be a problem.
Why would I ever want an SMS from a business? Email is fine.
When your car is ready to be picked up from a repair. When your table is ready. When you want to schedule an appointment. When your groceries are ready to be picked up/have things missing. And so on.
When my car is ready to be picked up - they call me. Even if I just let it go to voicemail, I still get a real time transcription.
When I use Instacart, everything goes through the app where I get notified. I don’t know if Instacart has the feature. But Uber/UberEats automatically translates the text to English in the app. I live in an area where there are a lot of Spanish speaking gig workers.
Email is fine here.
I disagree. The vast majority of emails I get don't trigger a notification, as I get over a hundred non-spam emails a day. These are high priority things, so that notification coming in through a higher priority notification process makes sense.
Email isn’t instant. It is usually delayed by 30-40s, but quite often gets into the 20-30 minutes range. Hell, a few weeks ago it took 6 hours to get the login verification emails for my epic games account and couldn’t login.
Emails don’t bounce until they haven’t been able to be delivered for DAYs. With an “s,” so you won’t even know there is a delay until the message doesn’t even matter anymore.
I don't want to be online on my phone, except when I decide that I want to browse the Web because I have spare time or need some information. SMS is perfect when I want someone to reach me in a timely manner.
Well, luckily I live in country where SMS spam is not an issue. If I look at the inbox of our IoT-like devices in the US, my approach to communication might be less feasible.
>businesses abandoning SMS
Good? Stop asking me for my phone number.
Nothing in what I posted was about solicitation.
It's about years of routine communication between a business and it's own customers that stops. Like my clients who had to stop providing product support over SMS - even tho that what their customers prefer.
It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose.
SMS spam continues to flow. Legit traffic is cut off unless the ransom is paid.
If you have a real business you can’t afford to get a cell phone from a major carrier?
If employees are all using softphones (like my client), purchasing cell phones for each employee adds expense and the complication of a 2nd phone number.
Expense and complexity are also the primary problems with TCR.
Well actually I know a little something about this. One of my specialties within the AWS consulting space is implementing Amazon Connect call centers solutions that involve SMS.
It takes awhile. But I’ve never had a customer complain about SMS messages going through
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/sms-nu...
And this was the original use case I was referring to
> It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose
Every business demands my phone number now, some even make it the primary identifier for accounts.
Meanwhile there are zero businesses that need to send me an SMS.
> It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone
You have a mobile phone plan from which you can’t send SMS?
Subscription, not plan but yes.
Thank $DEITY. Why didn't they do this sooner?
SMS spam hasn't stopped. I still get it. What TCR stops is legit SMS traffic. SMS that is wanted - and sometimes needed - by the people who receive it.
Small biz and their own customers is who TCR stops communicating.
Big biz pays for TCR compliance and they blast out SMS like they always have.
I’m happy about this. I don’t want texts from anyone ever that isn’t a single human paying for their own personal line
i think sms should be purely left to person-to-person communication.
i hate getting business sms
> i hate getting business sms
The big mass senders can afford TCR compliance. I'm betting that's who you hate getting sms from. Well, you'll keep getting their SMS.
It's small biz who is hurt by TCR. Biz who are run by people you've met and talk to.
I do business with lots of local shops and often SMS is the best fit for us to talk to each other. Except now we can't.
That's who TCR is protecting us from.
Which big mass spammers are you thinking of? The only ones I can think of are political campaigns; scams obviously can’t be compliant at all. And even political campaigns are having to switch providers once or twice a year since they generate over 90% of spam reports and don’t actually bother with even opt-out compliance.
Any legitimate business that’s actually compliant will respect opt-outs and actually stop texting after a STOP, and I seriously doubt they would actually survive if they blasted away with unsolicited a2p texting these days.
I’d rather get an email from them. At least with email I have a multitude of spam detection and filtering tools that just don’t exist for SMS text messages.
I'm with you there. And TCR doesn't do a thing to stop that. Big corps just pay for a compliance officer and blast away.
Small biz who know their customers - this is who TCR stops.
The extreme majority of spam text messages I receive are not through email gateways. This will do nothing to reduce sms spam.
I thought that when businesses started using WhatsApp. I still think it
If you're looking for a way to programmatically get messages to your phone I recommend Pushover. It's reasonably priced ($5 one time purchase for individuals) and it's run by a solo dev.
https://pushover.net/
ntfy is also a great option, FOSS, and you can host your own server
Looks pretty cool. Thanks!
operational.co is a good open source alternative if you're in the product space.
fun fact - this person (jcs) also founded lobste.rs
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Oh, yikes. I’ve come to rely on the email->sms gateway from AT&T. I’ve had they set up a s a forwarding address within my web mail for a few years now, and have filters which forward matching messages as SMS to my phone.
The formatting is often quite lousy but it’s enough to send me a nudge to check my email for a message from the library, a job I applied for, or whatever.
I wouldn’t have heard about this about it being posted here, so thank you!
Why not just have notifications only for that filter? I get not checking emails, I get so many that anything important is just ignored along with all of the other crap but if you already have a good filter, just use that.
I suppose I hadn’t discovered that! I set this up back in 2002, well before the iPhone and push notifications.
It’s worked for decades, and I haven’t needed to look for a different solution until now.
Thanks for the tip!
This is the weirdest notification workflow I have ever heard of.
Oh I’ve gotten weird about email, for sure — but this is more of an example of “the prototype goes to production”.
I put these filters in place long before iPhones were a thing, and when the only devices that supported push notifications were BlackBerry (maybe? I didn’t have one) and pagers.
In the early 2000s if I wanted to be notified to go home and check my email for something important, the email->sms gateway was really my only option.
It’s probably worth a revisit now though!
Right? The "notify me when this specific email comes in" problem has been well solved but on the other hand: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Really? You think "relay certain emails to my phone" is on par with that?
Email is a standard protocol and nobody owns it. Text messages have the carriers as gatekeepers and they want to get paid.
I feel as if alternative solutions are costly and can price out small businesses from messaging customers.
My local public library uses email to text to send messages about overdue books. While they don't develop their catalog system, I believe that using things like Twilio is costly, and I hope their upstream catalog provider isn't unduly burdened by this. I contract for a small company and we switched to email notifications exclusively since SMS was too expensive.
Maybe this says something about how SMS is the wrong platform to be using, but it looks like business WhatsApp messaging costs money too. I've never recieved spam over email to text.
> can price out small businesses from messaging customers
Inshallah
I miss having a carrier that had a dialup modem TAP server. As long as I had power, it was almost certain that the phone lines would also be up, and I could make a POTS call to send an alert. That was super convenient.
Another one bites the dust.
MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.
Since the FCC abdicated their regulatory power over texting during the first Trump administration under Ajit Pai, T-Mobile, AT&T & Verizon Wireless formed a cartel called The Campaign Registry which has run amok extorting data and cash out of businesses just to be allowed to go through a slow approval process.
Nominally, this was to reduce spam texts, but the vast majority of spam texts are internal to the Mobile Network Operators these days.
I think it's a little overstated to call tcr a cartel. Yes, it's a process, but it's gotten a lot better over the last 18 months.
People have been complaining about spam text for a long time. There aren't too many folks out there clamouring for anyone to be able to send them an SMS via email gateway.
For the past decade I've been shocked that email to sms was still allowed. sure, there are some legitimate organizations that have been using this route to avoid cost. But the whole idea is that if it's not worth 1 penny to send this message, then sms probably isn't the right channel.
Where do you get the data about spam texts being internal to MNOs these days? I keep track of the ones I receive and they're almost all going through third party companies that are themselves sending through Twilio, Bandwidth, Sinch, etc. This makes perfect sense to me given what I know of the market and how spammers operate.
As a result there always be a company accepting messages with false sender identity so scammers can operate easily...
How do you track and save these numbers? Manually or programmatically?
Manually. My MNO does pretty aggressive blocking, so I only have about 1/week to deal with. That's low enough that I report them manually rather than try to automate the constantly changing reporting process or deal with app development. The response is almost always some variation on "We've forwarded your report to the network we received it from".
I don't really get SMS/MMS. It made tons of sense in the 90s when we were all on our little Nokia.
Now, every device is internet connected. Email arrives in an instant. Whatsapp/Viber/FB Messenger exist and all provide a way better experience. RCS, 2 decades late, is like an april fools joke. Why are we still using this?
Can you elaborate a bit more on the similarity between MMS and email? I'm curious to know how similar. Is there an MMS RFC?
Telco has so, so, so, so many obscure and complicated technical specifications. They love their acronyms...
https://www.openmobilealliance.org/specifications/
Is probably a decent place to start
> MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.
MMS uses SMTP "with minor differences"? I've never heard that.
It's an incorrect statement. An MMS is delivered by sending an SMS to the recipient phone and the phone fetching the message via http. Very unlike SMTP.
Almost all of my spam messages are MMS text messages from throwaway mobile numbers.
Not sure the future of SMS in my life, but dang for whatever reason, people still want to use it.
I don't have as much need for email-=>sms gateways, but what about the other way? I much prefer to handle comms on my desktop, and presently I use google voice for SMS. It leaves plenty to be desired, though. Are there better alternatives?
voip.ms
(word of caution: only works with US numbers)
Canadian numbers too (and potentially anything in the NANP).
Can someone explain why my wife's texts from her iPhone routinely get sent to my email address?
Yes. It's because the Messages UI conflates iMessage groups (blue bubbles) with SMS/MMS/RCS groups (green bubbles), combined with the fact that you can iMessage an Apple user using either their phone number or any email address they have enabled for iMessaging.
So say you start a group message to Apple users. You add type their names and don't pay attention to whether Messages is using their phone number or email address to add them to the group. (Even worse, after you're done typing their name, Messages only shows the name so you can't even tell how they've been added w/o taping their name again.)
Now, when it's an iMessage group (blue bubbles), it doesn't matter how you added them.
But as soon as you add a non-Apple user, it becomes an SMS/MMS/RCS group (green bubbles).
Guess what happens to the Apple users who were added by email address? That's right, they get emails.
There's no indication whatsoever to anyone in the group that this is happening. And as a member of the group, you can't fix how you were added. The message group has to be abandoned and a new group needs to be created using only phone numbers.
It's a terrible UI. I've been dealing with it for years because originally I used Google Voice and there's both Apple and Android users in my extended family. But even after I finally ported my number over to my phone, my extended family still sometimes adds me to SMS/MMS/RCS groups using my email address.
(Why don't we just use WhatsApp you ask? Oh, we use that too. With varying degrees of technical literacy, we end up using all the things.)
I have years wondering why this happens from select iPhones from time to time, without any luck figuring it out.
Could it be that the person has the email address saved as the default contact method in their contacts?
For a bit of time I had no cell service, but people could use Messages to send to my email address for my iCloud account. Once cell service was restored to the device, messages from one person always came addressed to the email while everyone else reverted to the phone number. I just assumed that this person's contacts listing for me was updated, or possibly even a separate contact using just my email???? I never figured it out/confirmed it either
I believe it is. And it’s fixable, but obscure.
They talked about it on the accidental tech podcast years ago when someone emailed him with the solution to this problem which one of the hosts was having.
I’ve tried searching but I’m unable to find which episode it was since search engines don’t work anymore.
So here’s what I think it might be based on what little I remember. When messages you’re sending are going to the wrong address, I think what you…
1. Tap the contact pic at the top of the iMessage thread
2. On the first row of buttons, tap the far right “info” button with a generic contact poster icon
3. Tap the “message” link
4. All their iMessage addresses will pop up, choose the one you want to use
I think that might “move” the thread to the right place.
I know in your case it sounds like it’s the other party who would need to do this. If this doesn’t actually do anything or create a second thread, I’m sorry. I know there’s a way I just don’t remember it if it’s not the above.
Are there phone carriers that do support this? I send text messages from my servers.
I used web-based WhatsApp to get messages on my phone.
.
I think a penny is about the right price. What are the other options and how are those working?
50 percent of email is spam and Gmail has had to create multiple invoices to segment the emails that are probably not going to be read.
Snail mail is probably $1 to send something that will likely be thrown out.
Phone calls - we're rounding the corner after the days of auto insurance calls. But the behavior of only answering known callers might be here to stay.
Sms is the best channel at enforcing opt-in and if it's not worth $0.01 to reach me with the message, sms probably isn't the right channel
> If your city has 20,000 people sign up for text alerts, each alert you send is going to cost you $200
The city texts are fine, but you can see during campaign season that $0.01 is WAY WAY below their per-voter spend for their ad campaigns. I get texts from everybody in the race, even "thank you, I'm doing great, please re-elect me" texts from incumbents.
I got texts from candidates all over the country. I’m not going to donate to a random small city race 12 states over.
How about a $1/message politician surcharge?
They stopped working for me a few weeks ago
...what will spammers do? Tune in now, as desperate scammers polish resumes. "Skilled at bypassing filters and reaching millions with urgent inheritances seeks new opportunity." Local carrier pigeons reportedly terrified.
Not just the spammers, but the companies that still use it to send page outs to their employee's personal phones rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means. Won't somebody at AT&T think of these poor souls?
> rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means
What does PagerDuty do that makes things more appropriate? I would generally expect a middleman service to make things worse.
They can just use twilio like every other business that need's sms....
There’s been a leading theory that Twilio has turned a big blind eye to misuse of the their platform for sending spam. They have all these clauses, rules etc sure; they make a good show of it, but they are really slow for example to close loopholes, if at all. They’ve done a good job of making the whole thing look like they take it seriously while being clever enough to leave loopholes and obvious workarounds to anyone who knows where to look
Or so the theory goes
Drop a decent enough spend and they will look away for a while. Open an account with a burner gmail and test out the api using free credits - shut down within the hour.
IMO sms costs are extortion. It should be an open standard with standard interfaces and cost the same as email, which is to say be basically free.
There isn’t really any reason why it can’t be that I can think of
“But we want to send text messages for free!”
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