Description
NOTE: Changed this to Polaris Internal only. The information contained within this is valid, but slightly outdated as this same issue has expanded to more than T-Mobile.
Update March 25th, 2025: AT&T is also depreciating e-mail to SMS on June 17th, 2025. Say Goodbye to Email-to-Text and Text-to-Email - AT&T Wireless Customer Support
Update December 2024: Innovative Phone Alerts / Vega SMS is a recommended solution to this issue. Alternatively, a third party with similar capabilities can utilize the export text/SMS option within Notification Options in System Administration.
Update August 2022: Verizon is now limiting and/or fully blocking email to SMS traffic. Verizon helps block 11B spam texts, 26.5B Robocalls and counting | News Release | Verizon
Polaris Support has recently heard from a number of libraries that their patrons who utilize T-Mobile or Sprint as their mobile carrier and have TXT Messaging set as their notification delivery option are not receiving notifications from Polaris. After some research, we found that T-Mobile and Sprint have changed their guidelines on how they route and handle SMTP to SMS traffic and that they no longer accept traditional SMTP to SMS traffic, especially when that traffic appears to be generated from an application and not a human. The recommendation from these carriers for anyone experiencing an issue with sending messages to their customer base via SMTP to SMS is to invest in a short code service which will allow their customers to opt-in to the messages.
At this time, Polaris utilizes SMTP to SMS to send text messages and while individual e-mails sent to a SMS/mobile phone address will likely still go through to patrons using these carriers, notices sent via text message to patrons with T-Mobile or Sprint as their mobile carrier may not be received. The development required to allow Polaris to be able to utilize a short code for text messaging in order to support this change made by T-Mobile and Sprint is currently considered to be an enhancement. Our recommendation is for any libraries interested in seeing short code messaging supported in Polaris is to advocate for this feature via the IdeaLab as something to be developed in a future version.