Verizon blocking email-to-SMS messages from Eyezon
Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2024 9:25 am
As many Verizon (Xfinitity et. al.) customers have noticed, on Friday April 12th, the company that handles Verizon's external email-to-SMS service made a policy change that greatly affects how many messages we can send to Verizon's cusomters. This number is effectively zero.
As well, many of our messages are being returned by CloudFilter as "USER UNKNOWN" which causes our alerting engine to remove the contact as part of our own anti-SPAM reduction endeavours.
Verizon, along with most other carriers, uses CloudFilter by CloudFlare to filter out SPAM SMS messages to their customers. While CloudFilter does the filtering, the rules and rate of messages is decided by the carrier. On April 12th Verizon made a rule change that limits the amount of messages we can send to their customers to effectively zero per hour which means all messages to Verizon customers from Eyezon are blocked.
This has happened many times in the past with many American and Canadian carriers, and it is usually customer disapproval that gets the block lifted.
If you wish to contact Verizon to express your displeasure, remember to explain that this relates to their "EMAIL-TO-SMS" service, a la **********@vtext.com, not their normal SMS service. You can explain that you rely on your notifications from your security service and having CloudFilter block the messages causes you immense grief.
In the past we have recommended using Gmail to forward your alerts to your phone but it seems they are blocking Gmail for the same reason they are blocking Eyezon so that won't work. If you have alternate email service that will forward your messages, you can try that as an option.
Verizon's block does not affect any other notification method so PUSH, email, and DirectSMS are still options until the block is lifted.
As well, many of our messages are being returned by CloudFilter as "USER UNKNOWN" which causes our alerting engine to remove the contact as part of our own anti-SPAM reduction endeavours.
Verizon, along with most other carriers, uses CloudFilter by CloudFlare to filter out SPAM SMS messages to their customers. While CloudFilter does the filtering, the rules and rate of messages is decided by the carrier. On April 12th Verizon made a rule change that limits the amount of messages we can send to their customers to effectively zero per hour which means all messages to Verizon customers from Eyezon are blocked.
This has happened many times in the past with many American and Canadian carriers, and it is usually customer disapproval that gets the block lifted.
If you wish to contact Verizon to express your displeasure, remember to explain that this relates to their "EMAIL-TO-SMS" service, a la **********@vtext.com, not their normal SMS service. You can explain that you rely on your notifications from your security service and having CloudFilter block the messages causes you immense grief.
In the past we have recommended using Gmail to forward your alerts to your phone but it seems they are blocking Gmail for the same reason they are blocking Eyezon so that won't work. If you have alternate email service that will forward your messages, you can try that as an option.
Verizon's block does not affect any other notification method so PUSH, email, and DirectSMS are still options until the block is lifted.