What Happened?
In a move that has caught many businesses and IT teams off guard, AT&T has officially announced to discontinue its email-to-text gateway service. It is going to happen on June 17, 2025 (read more). This change means that sending text messages to AT&T subscribers using the format [email protected] or [email protected] no longer works. For countless organizations, this impacts automated alerting systems, monitoring tools, and business workflows that relied on this gateway for timely notifications.
The sudden discontinuation has created a critical need for a reliable, secure, and modern alternative to ensure that vital messages still reach the right people instantly. Enter SIGNL4 — a powerful, mobile alerting solution designed specifically for operational reliability and team responsiveness.
Why Was Email-to-Text So Popular?
Email-to-text has long been a popular workaround to send quick notifications without investing in a dedicated text gateway. System administrators, DevOps teams, and emergency responders used it to:
- Send alerts from monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix, or SolarWinds
- Notify staff about IT incidents, security breaches, or outages
- Communicate time-sensitive information without mobile apps
However, it had significant limitations:
- Lack of reliability (emails often delayed or blocked as spam)
- No acknowledgment or tracking
- No native support for on-call scheduling or duty management
- Minimal security controls
With AT&T shutting it down, organizations are seeking a next-generation alerting solution that offers real-time reliability, accountability, and mobility.
Meet SIGNL4: The Modern Alternative to Email-to-Text
SIGNL4 is a mobile-first alerting and incident response platform that empowers operational teams to receive, acknowledge, and act on critical alerts – anywhere, anytime. It bridges the gap between IT systems and human response, making sure the right people are alerted at the right time. And, even though it focuses on mobile push messages and it’s mobile app as a premier and powerful notification channel, it can deliver alerts and notifications SMS text and voice calls.
Why SIGNL4 is the Ideal Replacement
Here’s why SIGNL4 stands out as the go-to solution after AT&T’s email-to-text shutdown:
✅ Up and running in 5 mins
The email-to-text capability of SIGNL4 is readily available, no workflow building is required. All you have to do after sign-up is to have each user provision and validate their mobile text number. Each team in SIGNL4 automatically gets an inbound email address assigned. So, send your emails to that number and all users of that team receive a text message, and – once they have the SIGNL4 mobile alerting app installed – push message.
✅ Reliable and Instant Mobile Alerts
SIGNL4 ensures that alerts are delivered instantly through push notifications, text, voice calls, and email — all with confirmation and tracking. No more guessing whether a message was delivered or read.
✅ Team Routing and On-Call Scheduling
Unlike email-to-text, SIGNL4 supports intelligent routing based on who is on duty, ensuring that the right person receives the alert. You can easily configure duty schedules, shifts, and escalation paths.
✅ Acknowledgement and Accountability
Every alert can be acknowledged with a tap, and teams can see who’s responding in real-time — adding transparency and accountability to incident response.
✅ Secure and Auditable
SIGNL4 offers end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, and a detailed audit trail — ideal for compliance-heavy environments.
✅ Easy Integration
With out-of-the-box integrations for tools like Microsoft Teams, Azure Monitor, Splunk, and more, plus a REST API and webhook support, SIGNL4 fits seamlessly into existing workflows.
Use Cases: Who Benefits from Switching to SIGNL4?
- IT Ops & DevOps Teams needing reliable alerts from monitoring systems
- Industrial and manufacturing operations with automated alerts from SCADA or IoT platforms
- Field service teams needing rapid communication during incidents
- Security and emergency response units requiring dependable alerting and coordination
Conclusion
AT&T’s discontinuation of email-to-text is a wake-up call for organizations to modernize their alerting infrastructure. SIGNL4 not only replaces this outdated method but supercharges your incident response with intelligent, accountable, and mobile-first alerting.
Don’t wait for another alert to be lost. Upgrade to SIGNL4 today and ensure your critical messages are always delivered, heard, and acted upon.
Start your free trial
📌 SIGNL4 comes with a free trial of 30 days (no credit card required) to explore all its capabilities. After the trial, you can either opt for a commercial plan or you stick with the free plan which is automatically enabled after 30 days and provides email-to-push for 5 users max.
