How to email MMS to phone?

It would stop working for me every few months and I'd have to call T-Mobile to get it unblocked. I hadn't been getting messages through for awhile, so I called again. Per T-Mobile customer support, this service was discontinued as of August 2024.

Sheeple848 wrote:

tingfona wrote:

I basically only have a cell phone so my security system can send MMS messages with an image when it detects a person.  It was totally reliable when I first got the phone but it has not been reliable for quite a while now.

 

 

like complaining about your first bitcoin wallet getting hacked and your coin stolen

when hackers find value in an internet-based service, they’re going to mine as much value out of it as they can

service providers have to defend their service or it will become known as a vector for hackers to attack public systems...a public threat…

and obviously YM has been around too long and it doesn’t enforce enough restrictions to avoid that

Or Tmobile is just financially in Googles’ pocket ;)

non of the above, it works only 1 time from any email and then t-mobiles crappy AI spam bot flags it. That is way it use to work but no longer, there Ai has also flagged our companies numbers as spam, We only call customers who have requested info, no marketing

tingfona wrote:

I basically only have a cell phone so my security system can send MMS messages with an image when it detects a person.  It was totally reliable when I first got the phone but it has not been reliable for quite a while now.

 

like complaining about your first bitcoin wallet getting hacked and your coin stolen

when hackers find value in an internet-based service, they’re going to mine as much value out of it as they can

service providers have to defend their service or it will become known as a vector for hackers to attack public systems...a public threat…

and obviously YM has been around too long and it doesn’t enforce enough restrictions to avoid that

Or Tmobile is just financially in Googles’ pocket ;)

delete when convenient

Just tried it on my Google 6a (contract from Tmobile) and it works with my Gmail account but not with my Yahoo Mail (basic) account

this has been a problem for years, I used to use it all the time with YM and then it just suddenly stopped working, I never bothered to figure out what was going on with it but now I transfer more work between my desktop and my phone so I want to use it more often. Def works fine.

YM just doesn’t get much respect in the ionosphere. Lucky that corporate email servers still take it.

I do not want to rely on Gmail because Google is too greedy. They want ALL my personal info and all my network traffic.

I have had a few clients over the past 10 years that used email-based apps and I had to use Gmail with them, also some other server-side apps that also worked with Gmail but not YM. Otherwise I would never use it. But no matter what you use they’re going to try to lock you into it.

FIGURED OUT HOW TO WORKAROUND - I was able to email from my account@gmaildotcom, to my T-Mobile # 1234567890@tmomail.net, one time. The 2nd time I received the same errors everyone else is getting '550 5.1.1 server temporarily unavailable AUP#MXRT'. 3rd time same error. I was using typeapp Android email. Then I tried Gmail and Outlook - same error. it worked once so I kept trying, sending text, jpg and PDF - same error.

Then I thought about the really good information already posted here - that T-Mobile was rejecting due to spam concern. So I tried something else.

I emailed from a different email account of mine 2ndaccount@gmaildotcom to my 1234567890@tmomail.net phone number - IT WORKED! So I tried to send a 2nd time - same error as above. 3rd and 4th times errored out again, regardless if text or jpg or PDF.

So I tried to send from a 3rd different account 3rdaccount@gmaildotcom to my @tmomail.net it worked. But only the 1st time, each subsequent attempt failed. So I tried a 4thaccount@gmcom and 5thaccount@gmcom - each time I used a new email account that I had never used before to email my phone, it worked only the 1st time. And I could send text and jpg and PDF and it works the 1st time, and only the 1st time.

So it seems the 2nd and subsequent attempts are marked as spam and rejected. I don't know how long the 'lock' on the email account lasts - I'll try these same accounts that worked only 1 time, again in a day or 2 and see if it 'resets' the spam error associated with 2nd and subsequent attempts - I hope so, I only have about 35 emails.

I would be interested if anyone else can replicate this process

This basic functionality doesn’t work.  I recently attempted to use the @tmomail.net address and I get the “Your message couldn't be delivered. Despite repeated attempts to contact the recipient's email system it didn't respond” error message.  These attempts were made with 30 character messages.  I suspect it could be a hardware issue since I’ve noticed many incompatibilities between other cell phone company’s phones that have been brought over to TMobile.  Since some people’s combination of phones, email providers and internet providers are working, the ATTEMPT was made by TMobile to make this work like it does with other providers.

tingfona wrote:

With reference to wharriso message above, I just sent a test message from my swbell.net Email which goes via yahoo and it got through.  My security system zooms in on the “person” it detects and the attached images are generally less than 100 Kbytes.  Most MMS providers seem to limit messages to about 1 Mbyte and generally a text without the MMS arrives telling you it was “too big”.

 

I suspect yahoo and hotmail and maybe outlook are being blocked.  swbell.net may be getting through because the domain name is different.

I basically only have a cell phone so my security system can send MMS messages with an image when it detects a person.  It was totally reliable when I first got the phone but it has not been reliable for quite a while now.

I just sent a test message from the alarm system (it uses gmail) and it came through fine.  But it wasn’t working at all a couple of days ago.  I’m having health problems, and haven’t been able to stay on top of things, but am trying to get this resolved before I have surgery next week.

Bottom line, if T-Mobile can’t get to the bottom of this issue soon,  I’ll be looking for another provider.  My neighbor uses Cricket and has a similar security system and his messages have continued to work while mine were not.

Other threads when it first stopped working suggested it was caused by an FTC “anti-spam” rule and that T-Mobile and others simply purchased lame software to implement the rule which broke the utility of the gateways.  If this is true, it shouldn’t be rocket science to create a whitelist of Email addresses you want to get SMS/MMS messages from.  It could be automated by allowing messages through that are not from known spammers, and informing customers that a reply to the SMS/MMS would add that sender to the whitelist.  Let the “normal spam filter rules apply afterwards in the absence of a reply. 

With reference to wharriso message above, I just sent a test message from my swbell.net Email which goes via yahoo and it got through.  My security system zooms in on the “person” it detects and the attached images are generally less than 100 Kbytes.  Most MMS providers seem to limit messages to about 1 Mbyte and generally a text without the MMS arrives telling you it was “too big”.

For what its worth, I did an experiment yesterday.  I sent “just testing” through my gmail account to <phone number>@tmommail.net and it worked just fine.  I tried my yahoo account and I think it bounced, the message never made it.  I tried sending with my hotmail email account (many times) and the messages never made it.  I just started receiving failure messages about an hour ago, maybe 15 hours later.  It seems to me that T-Mobile is blocking hotmail (outlook) and yahoo email accounts.