sms to t-mobile usa

[metamatt]

Hi, I just switched my cell carrier to T-Mobile. After reconfiguring my notification mail settings in the eyez-on portal (which, correctly, resulted in a notification address of xxxxxxxxxx@tmomail.net), I started getting SMS notifications that come from a different short number each time, which breaks threading in my iPhone messages app.

The messages come from 9501, 9502, 9701, 9702, 9703, 9704, 9705, 9706... sometimes repeating and sometimes choosing a new number.

I found a post about this problem in T-Mobile's forums, https://support.t-mobile.com/message/457764#457764; it looks like a bug in their sms->email gateway but there is a workaround.

Basically, if the "from" address in the email message includes only an email address, T-Mobile gets confused and generates a 4-digit number as the sender for the SMS. If the "from" address also includes a name in parentheses, that name gets used as the sender for the SMS, which works out way better on my phone.

I confirmed this by sending messages from a few different mail clients to the tmomail.net address; messages from Mail.app on a Mac get the number and messages from the gmail web interface get the name.

Is it possible to modify the from address on your notification emails to be compatible with T-Mobile's crazy rules?

[metamatt]

To be clear: it looks like right now, notification messages come from "noreply@eyezon.com".

If instead you made the notification messages come from "noreply@eyezon.com <Eyez-On Notification>", I think this would do the trick.

If I mail myself at the tmomail.net address and the sender is "me@domain.com" with subject XYZ and body DEF, my phone gets an SMS from 9701 (or some other 4-digit number) with the contents "me@domain.com / XYZ / DEF".

If I mail myself using sender "me@domain.com <name>", my phone gets an MMS with the correct sender, the subject in boldface, and the body without truncation.

Seems like that same tmomail.net address is both an MMS and SMS gateway and it chooses which one based on the format of the from address (!) and the MMS behavior is vastly preferable.

[GrandWizard]

I'll foward this over to the server group.

[GrandWizard]

It seems alerts are already sent out like that, with Eyezon emails being sent from

"EyezON" <noreply@eyezon.com>

They will add the "common name" to the To: field along with the canonical email address.

[Cobra]

Thank you, I see the same problem on T-Mobile.

[metamatt]

Actually with some further experimentation, I'm not sure the sender email address format matters.

What does seem to matter is if the email has attachments. If the email has any attachments (including, if it's sent as "rich text" email including an HTML version) then it goes to T-Mo's MMS gateway (good). If it's plaintext only with no attachments, it goes to T-Mo's SMS gateway (yuck).

It's kind of crazy to have to add HTML to the message just to get T-Mo to handle it correctly, but it would be a big help.