Using Email to SMS service to send messages, as a business

Hi @AVC_Pro!

Thank you for contacting us. To receive assistance with your Business Account, kindly visit our website at https://bizcommunity.att.com/ and select the most suitable contact method. We appreciate you choosing AT&T.

To ATTHelp:

Are you sure you want us to go to bizcommunity? We don't have a business account. We are simply sending Notifications via email-to-sms to those AT&T customers who add their phone number to our system. Infact, we don't have an AT&T account at all. The reason I am posting here is because, AT&T customer service told one of our customers who is an AT&T user (and facing the issue of not getting notifications from us), that the sender needs to have a business account. This makes no sense at all, as we are not using any AT&T service by ourselves. 

Does this make sense?

@AVC_Pro 

This forum is focused on customer issues, and you don't have one of those.  You could sort of construe it as being an issue for your customers, and tell them to come here, but that's a bit of a stretch.  Moving to the Business Forums might put you in touch with other people who have dealt with similar situations and possibly business sales people who could explain what they meant by "get a business line."

I'll provide my viewpoint, which is that you're using what is meant to be a low volume user-convenience system to provide a service for which you are deriving revenue.  Sounds sort of like when Netflix started streaming movies and suddenly gigabytes of data were flowing through networks not designed to handle that sort of load and Netflix was the only one making money off of it.  You should be looking at something like Amazon SNS instead of SES, or maybe Trilio or Bandwidth.  See also AT&T's API for this: https://developer.att.com/landline-texting/pricing-details

@JefferMC

Thank you for the response. I will try to post this on business forums, but as to your response, (and hopefully if any AT&T member is really listening)

1. As for netflix comparison,  as far as I can tell, Netflix is not paying ISPs anything more than what anyone else does for network bandwidth. Sure, they do install caching/ hardware at various locations to make it faster, but not as a Fee to ISPs. I could be wrong. 

2. Also, yes we are a business, but it is the AT&T subscriber whose phone has support for email-to-sms puts his/ her phone number in the notification list, to get notified. This means the unique message indicating an alarm condition for his device is sent to him, and him only. Not like we are buying million phone numbers and blasting coupon codes for a sale.

3. Yes, we know of services like twilio, and we offer them to the customers, and we have to pass on the charge to the customer for such service. When the customer is paying for his cell connection, and email-to-sms is included in his plan, we can't say no to them using that to get notified instead of using another paid service.

4. Regardless, I would think it is basic decency to either let the sender or recipient know that there is an issue, and what to do about it, instead of simply blocking the messages, and letting the concerned parties scramble to find the source of the issue. 

@AVC_Pro — there seems to be a trend in the industry to protect against potential spam by blocking the ways which allow easy automation of SMS sending. A google search for "email to sms gateway stops working" shows a number of discussions on AT&T, T-Mobile & VZW forums all talking about the issues similar to what you're describing. I think @JefferMC is right and you'll have to look at paid services if you want a reliable system for SMS delivery. Or just stick with mobile push notifications if you have a mobile app — FWIW as a consumer I always prefer receiving push notifications to receiving SMS.

@dmapr

Totally. I understand the SPAM issue. And as I had mentioned previously, we are not blasting out sales coupons to randmom folks. The fact is, a message should be considered spam if atleast a few recipients mark or report it as spam. That does not happen in this case. As it is the recipient who ads their number. But those all come secondary. My intent of posting here was to find out/ get a solid response from AT&T support, making it clear that we are blocked, and here is why. Atleast that would give us a chance to explain what we are doing, and worst case, walk out with some clarity. 

You will not get that sort of statement from AT&T Support here.  There are some volume limits that they will not disclose that cover number of recipients on an e-mail, number of e-mails incoming from the same server in a period of time. etc.  I think these limits vary between normal e-mail and the SMS Gateway.  I think you'll have to tell your customers that if they use an SMS-Gateway e-mail, they may be subject to unpredictable volume limitations that you don't have any control over.  If they wish to be secure from that, they'll need to provide a phone number and permission for SMS.

Maybe they're looser with those sort of disclosures over in the Business Forums; I'm almost never over there, so I can't say.