Email2Phone turns an email into a text message. Send or forward the email to your yourname@email2phone.net address, and each phone number you have set to text gets an SMS with the subject and the start of the body. A number can get a text, a phone call that reads the email aloud, or both, so the alerts that have to wake someone can still ring.
How email to SMS works in Email2Phone
- Each phone number is set to call, text, or both. Filters decide which emails reach which numbers, exactly as they do for calls, and each number then calls, texts or both. Anything no filter excludes goes to your default number.
- One text per email. Eighty alert emails make eighty texts. A call works differently: it announces how many messages are waiting, so a burst is one call.
- 160 characters. The text carries the subject and the start of the body, cut to fit one SMS. Attachments and images are not sent.
- One way. Replies to a text go nowhere, and a text never counts as an acknowledgement. In a dialling list set to stop at the first acknowledgement, a text-only number gets its text and the list carries on to the next number.
- 1 credit per text to a US or Canadian number, from the same plan credits as calls. Texts to other countries can cost more than 1 credit.
- Quiet hours, Suspended Delivery and Spam Protection apply to texts as they do to calls. A text due in a quiet window is dropped, not held.
- Sent from Email2Phone's own registered US 10DLC number, so there is nothing for you to register and no carrier gateway to depend on.
Texts are included in the 30-day free trial, which delivers up to three emails a day, each as a call, a text or both, with no credit card. Every rule above, with the detail, is in text messages.
A call or a text: which to use
Use a text for the alerts someone should see soon, and a call for the ones someone has to act on now. A text arrives once, can be read in silence, and costs a credit per email. A call reads the whole message aloud, works on a landline, and on a phone with voicemail switched off calls back at 5, 15, 30, 60 and 60 minutes until somebody presses a key. Many setups put both on one number: the text puts the alert on screen, and the call waits for a person to press a key.
What an email to SMS gateway is, and why they are closing
Carrier gateway list last checked: 26 October 2026. It is revised when a carrier publishes a notice.
The rest of this page is about the free carrier gateways, such as number@vtext.com, that used to do the same job. Two of the three national US carrier gateways are gone or going: AT&T's shut down on 17 June 2025, Verizon's closes by 31 March 2027, and T-Mobile has never said either way. Many lists still online show all three as working. This one lists only what each carrier has published, with the source and the date it was checked; where a carrier has said nothing, it says so.
An email to SMS gateway is an address at a mobile carrier that turns an email into a text message. Send a message to 2125551234@vtext.com and it arrived on that Verizon phone as an SMS. The major US carriers each ran one, they were free, and they needed no account or contract, which is why monitoring tools, alarm panels, NAS boxes and UPS cards all learned to page people that way.
The carriers have said little about why they are closing. Verizon's notice mentions SMS spam filtering as a reason messages may already fail; AT&T's gives no reason at all; T-Mobile has published nothing. What is certain is the direction. Nothing replaces a carrier gateway like for like, and what you can do about an alert that depended on one comes down to what that alert needs to reach, which is the last section of this page.
The list
| Carrier | Email-to-text address | Status | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AT&T | number@txt.att.net (SMS), number@mms.att.net (MMS) |
Shut down 17 June 2025. AT&T's support article states that from that date email can no longer be used to send or receive texts on AT&T Wireless, in both directions. How to find alerts still sending to txt.att.net. | AT&T support | 26 Oct 2026 |
| Verizon | number@vtext.com (SMS), number@vzwpix.com (MMS) |
Shutting down; complete by 31 March 2027. Verizon's notice says some senders may lose access before that date, and that messages may already fail because of SMS spam filtering or because the recipient turned the feature off. Business customers are pointed at Verizon's paid Enterprise Messaging (EMAG). | Verizon support notice | 26 Oct 2026 |
| T-Mobile | number@tmomail.net |
No published shutdown notice. T-Mobile's support pages still describe the address as a delivery path. Separately, and not from any carrier page: administrators have reported messages failing or arriving only some of the time since at least 2023. Test before depending on it. | T-Mobile support | 26 Oct 2026 |
| Google Fi | number@msg.fi.google.com |
Carrier-documented; no shutdown notice found. Google Fi's help page describes the address and an 8 MB attachment limit and carries no notice of discontinuation. Not tested by this page. | Google Fi help | 26 Oct 2026 |
Prepaid brands and MVNOs. Cricket, Metro by T-Mobile, Boost, Mint, Visible, Xfinity Mobile, UScellular and Consumer Cellular had published no statement either way about their email-to-text addresses as of 10 September 2026, and this page does not guess. If you depend on one, test it (below) and keep testing.
The former Sprint address, number@messaging.sprintpcs.com, has belonged to T-Mobile since the merger. T-Mobile has published nothing about it, but the domain no longer exists in DNS (checked 28 October 2026), so mail sent there cannot be delivered.
Which carriers have shut down email to text?
AT&T, on 17 June 2025, and Verizon, by 31 March 2027 with some senders losing access earlier. T-Mobile has published nothing; reports from administrators, not from T-Mobile, describe its gateway failing or delivering only some of the time since at least 2023. Google Fi still documents its gateway. No other US carrier has published a notice either way.
What about T-Mobile?
T-Mobile has published no shutdown notice, and its support pages still describe number@tmomail.net. Administrators, not the carrier, have reported messages failing or arriving only some of the time since at least 2023, so test before relying on it. What we could verify about T-Mobile email to text, including Metro, Mint, UScellular and old Sprint numbers, has its own page.
How do I test if an email to text gateway still works?
Send a test from the system that will actually use it, not from your own mailbox, and watch for the text on a phone you are holding. Four checks, in order:
- Send from the device or tool itself. A monitoring tool, NAS or UPS card sends through its own configured mail path; a test from your desktop proves nothing about that path.
- Do not wait for a bounce. Carrier gateways rarely bounce. A message that never arrives usually produces no error anywhere, so the absence of a bounce is not a pass.
- Check the sending log. Postfix or Exim logs, an Exchange message trace, or the tool's own notification log will show the message as sent. Sent and not received means that route failed; it does not say why. Verizon's own notice lists spam filtering and a recipient's settings as other reasons a message can vanish, so a failed test is a reason to stop depending on the gateway, not proof it has closed.
- Repeat it. Verizon's notice says senders may lose access before the final date, and reports on T-Mobile describe delivery stopping without warning. A gateway that passed in June can fail in July. Put the test on a calendar.
What replaces a carrier email to SMS gateway?
There is no free like-for-like replacement, but an email can still become a text. Email2Phone gives you an address that turns each email into a text, a phone call or both, at 1 credit a text to the US or Canada. The other options are an SMS provider of your own (a new address or an API, with A2P 10DLC registration for US traffic), an incident platform such as PagerDuty, or a push notification app. The two carrier pages compare them in detail: what to use now that AT&T email to text has shut down and what breaks when Verizon email to text shuts down.
For the alerts that have to reach a person, a text is not enough on its own, because nobody has to confirm they read it. Send those to the same Email2Phone address and route the alert to a phone call instead, or as well. The phone rings and a voice reads the message; it works on a landline, needs no app, and a burst of alerts is one call rather than one per message. If what you wanted was to send an email to a phone number, that has its own short answer.
Sources
- AT&T, "Say goodbye to email-to-text and text-to-email", att.com. Accessed 26 October 2026.
- Verizon, "Notice to Customers: Shutdown of email to Vtext and VZWPix", verizon.com. Accessed 26 October 2026.
- T-Mobile, "Help with scams & spam", t-mobile.com. Accessed 26 October 2026. Still describes tmomail.net delivery; no shutdown notice found on t-mobile.com.
- Google, "Send and receive emails over text message", Google Fi Wireless Help. Accessed 26 October 2026.