Contact w/ clue re: AT&T SMS email gateway?

Tue Sep 22 23:26:33 UTC 2009

Many people responded to me directly, so I thought I would summarize
my findings.

1) AT&T Customer Service never returned my call, despite saying they
would.  I guess they couldn't get to the right folks.  The occasional
curse of being in a really large company.

2) A very kind inside AT&T person from this list replied to me
privately and informed me that they had just cut over to a new gateway
for the consumer mail-to-SMS service and that they were experiencing
some issues with it.  Perhaps the issue was a massive influx of
messages when they brought the system back, but that is just me
speculating.  Doesn't explain the message body corruption issue,
though.

3) Someone let me know that AT&T Wireless has a business offering
called Enterprise Paging:
http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/solutions/email-messaging/enterprise-paging.jsp

This costs about $5.00 extra per month and offers a separate
email-to-SMS gateway and other SMS injection methods:
WCTP, SNPP, TAP .  This service uses 10-digit-number at page.att.net as
the gateway email address format.

Another benefit is longer messages - up to 456 characters.  This can be helpful.

I opted for upgrading to Enterprise Paging.  Solved the issue for me,
seems reliable, and offers options that give me value.  Also has 24/7
support and (apparently) some sort of SLA.

Other reports indicate the @txt.att.net consumer gateway has settled
down after the issues from last week.

Hope this helps some folks.

-Dave