Cell Carriers Are Shutting Down Email-to-Text Capability

If your Alarm.com or Total Connect 2.0 alerts show up as text messages, they may rely on an old email-to-text trick that carriers are now shutting down. You might not notice when it quietly stops working. AT&T and T-Mobile have already cut theirs off for good, and Verizon's shutdown looms.

This isn't a rumor or a future warning. For two of the three major carriers, it has already happened. If you set up your alarm notifications years ago and haven't touched them since, this is worth five minutes of your time today.

What Is Email-to-Text, and Why Did People Use It?

Before Alarm.com and Total Connect 2.0 offered push notifications through their own apps, there was a popular workaround for getting alarm alerts as text messages. Every major carrier had (or still has) a special email address format that turns an email into a text. Send an email to a phone number followed by the carrier's domain, like 5551234567@vtext.com for Verizon or 5551234567@tmomail.net for T-Mobile, and it lands on that phone as an SMS.

Alarm.com and Total Connect 2.0 both let you add an email address as a notification destination. Plenty of customers used that feature with a carrier's email-to-text address instead of a real email inbox, which let them get alarm alerts as texts without needing a smartphone app at all. It worked well for a long time, especially before push notifications existed as an option.

Carriers Are Shutting the Gateway Down

Email-to-text was never officially part of how Alarm.com or Total Connect 2.0 were designed to send alerts. It only worked because carriers allowed it, and carriers are walking that back.

T-Mobile hasn't published anything official about this, which is why we can't point you to a source the way we can for AT&T and Verizon. Based on reports from users online, the shutdown appears to have happened quietly around the same time as AT&T's, on June 17, 2025.

Why This Is Risky If You're Still Using It

The dangerous part isn't that this feature is going away. It's how it goes away. There's no error message on your alarm system and no warning in the app. The text messages just stop arriving, and unless you're specifically testing your system, you may not find out until you need an alert and it never comes.

For an alarm or fire notification, that gap is exactly the wrong place to lose reliability.

Alarm.com Already Saw This Coming

This shift didn't come out of nowhere. Back in March 2024, Alarm.com rolled out a push notification migration tool aimed at customers on carriers with degraded SMS and MMS delivery, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Rogers in Canada among them. At the time, Alarm.com called the migration voluntary, but noted it "may become mandatory" if carrier changes made it necessary. That's more or less what's happening now.

Switch to Push Notifications Today

Push notifications don't depend on carrier text messaging at all. They travel over your phone's internet connection, cellular data or WiFi, straight to the Alarm.com app or the Total Connect 2.0 app. That also means they can do things a text message can't, like let you act directly on an alert or come through even when your phone is set to Do Not Disturb.

Open your notification settings in the Alarm.com app or the Total Connect 2.0 app and make sure push notifications are turned on for the alerts you care about, arming and disarming, sensor activity, and alarms especially. If you're not sure how your account is currently set up, or you want help moving away from an old email-to-text address, contact our support team and we'll walk through it with you.

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