ATT ceasing their email to sms gateway

[LenR]

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1061254/

Is there an easy alternative for home users? I monitor several freezers and alert on temp.

Thanks.

[tim.mooney]

The other cellular vendors are headed that way too, at least in the US. Verizon's consumer email-to-SMS gateway will sometimes work, but it's so unpredictable and unreliable that it's basically pointless. My workplace is probably going to pay for Verizon's enterprise messaging gateway (EMAG), but it has its own issues and is still a remote (cloud-based) email-to-SMS gateway. It's probably too expensive monthly to even consider for a home user.

I've been looking for an on-premise modem or appliance that will gateway to SMS that I could use with Zabbix, and at least in the US the options are basically nonexistent. I started looking on these forums, but all the hits I've found are pretty ancient (from the days of Europe using GSM).

The only three on-premise "appliance" options I found were

1. the Varius Message Router, which seems to be Asia only (doesn't appear to support the wavebands used in the US)
2. SMSEagle , which appears to work in the US, but seems to be the most expensive of its competitors
3. the HW-group SMS-GW3, which also doesn't appear to work in the US

I know it's possible to buy a pre-paid number of SMS messages from Twilio, but I don't know whether it's a hassle to set up a contract with them. Even with their complicated pricing structure and cross-carrier fees to consider, it probably ends up being about $0.02 per SMS. A $25.00 or $50.00 pre-paid plan will probably get you SMS messaging for a long time. I just don't know how difficult it is to get started.

Good luck and let us know what you end up doing.

[LenR]

My Zabbix server is in the cloud (Vultr). If my server were local I wouldn't get notifications if there was a power failure, even if I had it on UPS, because the ISP dies. The cloud lets me alert on nodata from the temperature probes. Of course, if I'm home, I know if it's power or not. Plus the same setup works for other family members, as long as they have wifi, I can make it work. The probes are Raspberry Pi Zero W's.

I'm evaluating Twilio, it's a royal pain to set up, the slant is toward business, using toll free numbers and verifying you with an IRS EIN, which I don't have. The less obvious path in Twilio is a "sole proprietor" with a "local" number, but I'm waiting to see if they validate that config. It looks like it may take $10-$20 to setup, a few dollars a month for the phone number and per-message charges.

I'm back to working part time for the edu from where I retired and going to work the same issue for them. Our EA (Enterprise Architecture) team says we have a contract with Twilio, so it may be a lot easier there.

[tim.mooney]

The only reason I knew about the pre-paid option for Twilio is that the Enterprise Application group at the edu where I work uses that prepaid option as part of their multifactor/password recovery workflow in some of our in-house apps.