Binaryfaith

Email to SMS.. Pretty basic one would think.. At&t simply doesn’t get it..

Nor do they get basic concepts like customer service, troubleshooting, provisioning or systems management. Here is a case in point.

It appears that the pager that my company has been using maxes out at 500 messages a month. I’ve managed to severely get the company overcharged due to some system alerts. .. So I was asked to have my cell be used as a pager ($20 unlimited is way better.) This person said that he has had no problems sending email to his phone number @ txt.att.net.. When I tried it, I got a bounce.

So I called at&t and spoke to a standard rep. She had me reset my phone no less than 4 times before she was willing to escalate me to a higher support person. Once with that person, she had me reset my phone again. After I did that, we tried more attempts before she told me to go to the at&t store to exchange my SIM card.

While at the store, I replaced the SIM and tried the email again.. It failed (as expected)
At that point, the associate said “try # @ mycingular.net”, which worked! He said that he had done that years ago and happened to think of it.

Now, fast forward a couple of hours. I sent my phone the test, and it worked, but then I replied to the text and the “from” address was the txt.att.net! This means that should I respond through SMS, the recipient can’t respond back to me through that message… It gets bounced.

After figuring this out, I called AT&T after hours support and they basically told me that I’m attempting to use old tech and that they don’t know anything about it and they can’t support it. Looks like I get to make a phone call tomorrow. Oh the joy.