Not that long ago I was able to send email to SMS gateways (eg, vzwpix.com).
Now I’m getting a bounce message that appears to come from MxRoute filters. Is this new? Why?
Any way around it?
xxxyyyzzzz(at)vzwpix(dot)com
host filtergroup.mxroute(dot)com [140.82.40.27]
SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<xxxyyyzzzz(at)vzwpix(dot)com>:
554 5.7.1 <xxxyyyzzzz(at)vzwpix(dot)com>: Recipient address rejected:
Email to SMS is not allowed on our platform
It’s real damn easy for it to be a solution. Here’s what happens:
One spam message goes out to AT&T.
Here’s the result:
Every single one of our customers cannot send ANY email to ANY user at Yahoo, AT&T, or any of their sub-brands for 2 weeks while I personally negotiate the end of the war.
Same thing with Verizon but worse. I had to negotiate with the CEO’s team for weeks and outsource all email to every brand they even arguably own in the meantime. Why? One customer’s email account was compromised for 15 minutes. Now consider that 5-10 email accounts are compromised every day because users can’t stop reusing bad passwords. I catch them, but you can thank my policy for it not causing you to not be able to send any email to AOL, Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, etc for 2 weeks after each one.
You were not able to send those messages to vzwpix at any recent time, I added that error to let you know to stop trying. They weren’t going through for a very long time. If you want to automatically send text messages you need to conform to a wealth of regulations and guidelines in that industry, and that’s why you should be using a SMS company like Twilio to handle the job. I cannot possibly expect my users to conform to those regulations around when certain messages can be sent, etc. Nor will I be developing such a system that forces customers to comply with those wide ranging regulations that change by country code, as companies like Twilio and the like exist for exactly that purpose. Neither can AT&T or Verizon expect that of my customers, that’s why they just block us entirely across all of their brands when ONE SINGLE user does something subjectively stupid. If I allowed this again, I might as well pack up the whole business and join the unemployment line early. There is no middle ground, and that’s their decision not mine.
So a very long time ago I blocked these, and I added it to our policy. We are not an SMS company. There is a huge set of regulations for SMS that vary by country, it cannot be treated as a casual outlet for an email.
I won’t say that this is new as it has been in place for several months now.
The reasoning is that if MXroute allowed emails to SMS, one bad actor could completely take down the ability to deliver emails to a specific provider.
whereas as this solution pre-emptively takes down the ability to send emails to all providers? How is that a solution?