Tech Support
Joined: 25 Aug 2003
Posts: 4387
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 Posted: Wed May 07, 2025 9:38 am Post subject: |
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Unfortunately, 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
txt.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, you'll definitely want to register for the Firstnet Messaging portal, which will allow you to send SMS to any of your AT&T first responders with a method far more efficient and reliable than email/SMTP.
To explain a bit, you, the dispatch center/sender, gets whitelisted for access to their Firstnet Messaging gateway at https://messaging.firstnet.com and you're then allowed to add all of your AT&T/Firstnet recipients to your users list so you're allowed to message them.
If you don't already have a Firstnet account, you 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 you can configure PageGate to route your traffic through their service and they charge a nominal per message fee to do so.
From our experience with other dispatch centers, though, if you register with the Firstnet messaging system, you should be given the ability to add any AT&T phone number to the Firstnet system so you can message any of your 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 you can message your Verizon first responders through their priority system as well and I would definitely recommend investigating that, if you 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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