Tech Support
Joined: 25 Aug 2003
Posts: 4387
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 Posted: Wed May 07, 2025 9:41 am Post subject: AT&T is ending support for public Email-to-SMS gateways |
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AT&T is ending their support for Email-to-SMS through the following gateways on June 17, 2025:
txt.att.net
mms.att.net
txt.firstnet-mail.com
mms.firstnet-mail.com
In the leadup to that, they've effectively stopped supporting those gateways and messaging has become increasingly unreliable in the leadup to the shutdown.
As a result, public safety related organizations will definitely want to register for the Firstnet Messaging portal, which will allow them to send SMS to any of their AT&T first responders with a method far more efficient and reliable than email/SMTP.
To explain a bit, dispatch centers can get whitelisted for access to AT&T's Firstnet Messaging gateway at https://messaging.firstnet.com and they're then allowed to add all of their AT&T/Firstnet recipients to their users list so they're allowed to message them.
If they don't already have a Firstnet account, they can start the process here: https://www.firstnet.com/signup/
To our knowledge, there aren't any free solutions that can send to all carriers. There are paid solutions like ClickSend, Twilio, RingCentral and many other SMS APIs. These companies provide a secure online host and them can configure PageGate to route their traffic through their service and they charge a nominal per message fee to do so.
From our experience with other dispatch centers, though, if them register with the Firstnet messaging system, them should be given the ability to add any AT&T phone number to the Firstnet system so them can message any of their first responders on AT&T or with a Firstnet registered device through their priority gateway since they're doing away with their public gateway option.
On a somewhat related note, Verizon offers dispatch centers free access to their enterprise messaging platform so them can message their Verizon first responders through their priority system as well and I would definitely recommend investigating that, if them don't already have access. These priority SMS delivery systems are incredibly fast and reliable, especially compared to SMTP/email in an era where the carriers are trying to shut their old Email-to-SMS systems down.
For non-emergency management and public sector folks reading this, unfortunately, there will be no more free, public methods of sending SMS to AT&T phones after June 17, 2025 that we are currently aware of.
You will have to use a paid method of delivery, like cellular hardware, a business messaging gateway or an SMS API, and we're quite happy to say that PageGate supports all of those methods. |
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