Email-to-SMS no more?

Email-to-SMS gateways were once a popular tool for email geeks and savvy sysadmins to ping themselves with important notifications. Nowadays? They're either dead and gone, in the process of shutting down, or problematic enough that we can't even tell if they're still alive.

• Verizon's vtext.com: Shutting down by the end of March 2027.
• AT&T's txt.att.net: Shut down in June 2025.
• T-Mobile tmomail.net: Probably shut down? Lots of users reporting that it no longer works, though there’s still some mention of it on T-Mobile’s website.

And even when they were alive, they weren’t always that great. Systems were overwhelmed, you’d never really know what the spam filtering was doing, or you were receiving spam through it yourself. These gateways were never a perfect substitute for actual SMS notifications – and definitely weren’t suitable for sending any sort of bulk email.

So what do you do if you want to add simple SMS notifications to your crontab-called shell script? Well, it looks like tools like TextBolt and Text.Email can help, but they’re not the cheapest thing in the world, starting at $20-$30 per month. They are, however, probably easier and quicker to get started with, compared to a full SMS notification API that a company like Infobip, Twilio or Plivo would offer.