How to email MMS to phone?

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.

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”.

There is *definitely* an issue with T-Mobile where it comes to ‘tmomail.net’, @fireguy_6364 . I have been using this service to receive “on call” alerts for work issues for years. A couple of years ago, the reliability of tmomail.net messages started decreasing. At the time, I had a discussion with a VP of T-Mobile who works with the ‘tmomail.net’ product: it seems they’ve been having massive issues with SPAM, so they’ve tightened their SPAM rules more and more over the years.

I have periodically changed my alert message format, as well as the email provider with which I send the messages. Upon analyzing the failure messages I receive (in my junk mailbox hours after the message was sent), I usually can fix the issue (ie, ensure the message headers contain minimal SPAM signals). However, in the last few months, the messages have been failing with “server temporarily unavailable AUP#MSRT”.

AUP stands for Acceptable Use Policy, which suggests my messages are once again being marked as SPAM by T-Mobile’s services. Further, the failure messages are coming from ‘tmo-west.mx.a.cloudfilter.net’ - which is the company T-Mobile uses for SPAM filtering.

I use this service for a week every month, during which I am on call for work support. Work emails the messages to my mail account - usually a few messages per week from work, and one test message per day from myself to ensure my tmomail is working - so it’s not a ton of messages. I use an app I wrote to send the ‘tmomail.net’ message from my current email account such that it is not “forwarded” (which is a SPAM signal) - it is a brand new message sent specifically from that account. AND, it’s single messages, coming from my own mail account to my own phone - I’m not doing “business” or “mass marketing email” or anything of that genre. Yet, still...

As for mail services, I went from a couple of generic email services, to gmail, then to iCloud when gmail started getting blocked. All of them worked for a short time, after which ‘cloudfilter’ started blocking the messages. As I noted, the messages I get from iCloud account now say either the above, or occasionally that cloudfilter refused to talk with iCloud.com. And the failures are ALWAYS from ‘tmo’-something at cloudfilter - so it’s definitely T-Mobile causing the problem.

Same as kglad above, I could email to tmobile text using gmail, but not hotmail.

I’m having the same issues I used to receive message alerts from Tradingview but they just stopped like 2 weeks ago.  

I, too, am having trouble.  tmomail.net tells my mail server that my message was accepted allowed and sent.  I get no text message.  If I do the same from gmail, it works.  

@sweetpeach Thanks for the quick reply.  The file is about 400K.  One thing that I did not mention is that I wasn’t using an email client nor the web app to send the email. I was using a program which I developed for monitoring purposes.  No problem with Verizon, but not working on T Mobile.  Verizon uses 2 separate domains for SMS and MMS while T mobile uses just 1 domain for both.  Perhaps I’m just missing a setting.

email to xxxxxxxxxx@tmomail.net works for me.  However, only text goes through.  Anyone knows how to email a picture to the phone?  I did it by attaching the picture to the email.  Perhaps the email need to be formatted in a special way?  I have no problem emailing picture to my phone when I was with Verizon.  Not working with T Mobile.

"I am having the same Error message (550) and using the same format.  My number was originally from Verizon."

Ditto for me.

I found that when I include a subject line on the email message it fails.

I found that when I do NOT include a subject line on the email message, with exactly the same body of the email message, it works fine.

Hi Marissa,

I'm having issues with sending a plain text email to my mobile, is this functionality still working?
Please let me know

Thanks