Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other US carriers are retiring the email-to-SMS gateways that IT teams have relied on for decades. This page tracks shutdown dates, explains the alternatives, and provides migration guidance for common monitoring stacks.
Last updated: 2026-05-13
Confirmed shutdown dates for major US carriers. Each row links to the carrier's official announcement.
| Carrier | Gateway domain | Status | Effective date |
|---|---|---|---|
| T-Mobile | tmomail.net | Shut down | December 2024 |
| AT&T | txt.att.net, mms.att.net | Shut down | June 17, 2025 |
| Verizon | vtext.com, vzwpix.com | Scheduled | March 31, 2027 |
Sprint's legacy gateway (messaging.sprintpcs.com) was retired as part of the T-Mobile/Sprint network consolidation. Smaller carrier gateways (US Cellular, Boost, Cricket) are still being tracked — sections will be added as we verify their announcements.
Carrier email-to-SMS gateways were never a contracted service. Carriers offered them as a courtesy during the early SMS era, when traffic was low and the integration cost was negligible. There was no SLA, no support, no billing relationship, and no authentication on the email side.
That model became untenable as carriers came under regulatory and operational pressure. The FCC's push for A2P (application-to-person) authentication, the rise of 10DLC registration requirements, and the steady increase in spam and phishing routed through unauthenticated gateways together made the legacy model incompatible with modern messaging requirements.
The shutdowns are not about taking something away from customers — they are about retiring infrastructure that was never designed for the volume, authentication, or compliance requirements messaging now operates under. The same forces that drove the move to A2P 10DLC for marketing SMS have caught up with the operational use cases — monitoring alerts, two-factor codes, on-call paging — that quietly relied on these gateways for decades.
The practical implication: IT teams that built their monitoring around user@vtext.com-style email addresses now need to route those alerts through a proper messaging path. The good news is that the replacement landscape is mature; the bad news is that there is no carrier-side migration path — the email addresses you have been using simply stop working on their announced date.
tmomail.net
T-Mobile retired email-to-SMS at the consumer support boundary. As of the shutdown, messages sent to number@tmomail.net no longer deliver. T-Mobile's public guidance recommends customers and businesses move to authenticated A2P channels (10DLC, toll-free, or short code) for application messaging.
txt.att.net, mms.att.net
AT&T retired both its SMS (txt.att.net) and MMS (mms.att.net) email gateways together in mid-2025. Messages to those domains stopped delivering on the effective date with no grace period. AT&T's guidance points customers toward A2P 10DLC for application-driven messaging.
vtext.com, vzwpix.com
Verizon is the last of the Big Three to retire its email-to-SMS gateway. The vtext.com and vzwpix.com domains remain operational through the announced date. IT teams still routing alerts through these addresses have until March 31, 2027 to migrate — but the prior shutdowns at T-Mobile and AT&T mean any cross-carrier delivery is already significantly broken in practice.
If your team relies on carrier email-to-SMS for production alerting, the impact falls into three buckets:
A reasonable starting point is to grep your monitoring config, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code for known carrier gateway domains:
# Find references to retiring carrier SMS gateways grep -rE '@(vtext\.com|vzwpix\.com|txt\.att\.net|mms\.att\.net|tmomail\.net)' \ /etc/ /opt/monitoring/ ~/playbooks/
There are three honest categories of replacement, each with real tradeoffs:
Twilio, AWS SNS, Bandwidth, MessageBird, and similar providers. Maximum flexibility, but you build the email parser, deduplication, rate limiting, on-call rotation, opt-out handling, and audit logging yourself. The right answer if you have engineering capacity and unusual requirements.
PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call. Comprehensive feature set including on-call schedules, escalations, and incident timelines. Often overkill if you just need email-to-SMS, and the pricing reflects the broader feature set.
Drop-in replacements that preserve the existing email-based integration pattern — your monitoring tools keep sending email, the bridge handles parsing and SMS delivery. Lower migration cost than the other two options. SigSpan is one of these; we explain how it fits at the bottom of this page.
Per-tool migration guides for Nagios, Zabbix, Datadog, Prometheus Alertmanager, and others are in progress and will be added to this page as they are verified.
No. The carriers own those domains (vtext.com, txt.att.net, tmomail.net) and have shut down their MX records. There is no DNS-level or SMTP-level forwarding option available to customers. The addresses you change have to be changed at the source — in your monitoring config, your scripts, your inventory.
It does not help. The Big Three have either shut down or announced shutdown dates, so there is no carrier you can switch to that preserves the email-to-SMS path. Smaller MVNOs ride on the same underlying carrier networks and inherit the same retirement.
AT&T retired both SMS (txt.att.net) and MMS (mms.att.net) gateways together in June 2025. Verizon's March 2027 retirement covers both vtext.com (SMS) and vzwpix.com (MMS). T-Mobile's tmomail.net handled both message types and was retired in December 2024.
Yes. Any path that goes through a carrier email gateway is affected, regardless of whether it carries a critical alert or a routine notification. The shutdowns are domain-level, not message-level.
For operational messages to consenting employees (on-call alerts, internal monitoring), the TCPA exposure is low — there is implied consent from the employment relationship and the message content is operational, not promotional. For non-employee recipients or any messaging that could be construed as marketing, you need documented opt-in and a working STOP/UNSUBSCRIBE path. Most modern SMS providers handle this for you; some make it your responsibility. Check before signing.
If you send application-to-person SMS through a US long code, yes — A2P 10DLC registration is required by the carriers, not the SMS providers. Your SMS provider handles the registration mechanics, but you provide brand and campaign details. Registration takes days to weeks. Toll-free and short codes have separate registration processes.
Most replacement options support a test or staging mode that routes messages to a designated number or sandbox rather than the real on-call rotation. Validate the path end-to-end (parse, route, deliver) with low-volume test traffic before cutting over production alerts. Doing the cutover during a planned maintenance window is also reasonable.
This reference page is maintained by SigSpan, an email-to-SMS bridge platform built specifically for the carrier gateway transition. If you are evaluating a drop-in replacement for a retiring carrier gateway:
See an error or have a more recent source? Email admin@sigspan.com — we update this page as soon as we can verify changes.