SMS Delivery Issue to AT&T Devices

[Chad Hall]

Anyone else having issues sending notifications from ServiceNow via email to AT&T SMS devices? For many years we've used the Email2SMS functionality that nearly every US provider supports to send text messages to our users via their SMS email address. For AT&T these take the form of 'phonenumber@txt.att.net' or 'phonenumber@mms.att.net'. Beginning Friday 1/18/19 this stopped working about 85% of the time. Emails sent to these same AT&T devices work fine when sent from other sources besides ServiceNow. When a ServiceNow email doesn't get delivered we get a bounce back reply from 'general@smartmessagingsuite.com' with this generic statement in the body:

"<>
@MESSAGE@=1 033 ERROR - the request is not authenticated

Email2SMS message could not be accepted as user acxiom@service-now.com cannot be authenticated. Please check your settings before trying again."

After some research it appears that smartmessagingsuite.com is an AT&T messaging service so I know its getting to AT&T. Its next to impossible to get anyone from AT&T Support who even knows that Email2SMS even exists, so nobody has been able to help me. I opened a HI ticket and while they understood the issue I'm not sure they're getting anywhere with AT&T on a solution as its now been 5 days with no resolution. ServiceNow was able to see that our messages to 'phonenumber@txt.att.net' started getting redirected to 'phonenumber@smartmessagingsuite.com' on 1/18/19 but I have no explanation from anyone why that's happening, what it truly means, or what we can do about it.

Since it only seems to affect our ServiceNow notifications I can only assume that its a ServiceNow-specific problem with AT&T. And if that assumption is correct then I suspect it may be impacting a lot of you all as well. We rely heavily on text messages for our high priority incidents so this is kind of critical for us. Please let me know if you've encountered this or if you have any ideas on how to resolve it. And before anyone suggests that we just use the Notify plugin for direct SMS messaging through Twilio, we don't own that and its not in the budget. 

Thanks! I appreciate the help!

Chad Hall

Acxiom

[Chad Hall]

We get a bounce back and its never delivered. Although about 15% of ours actually make it to the AT&T devices without a bounce back or any delay. Its hit or miss. Mostly miss.

[Erik Stolberg]

The messages will get sent back to the email used to initially send the SMS. If you customized the email address (on the sysevent_email_action table) to send from an address that doesn't flow back into ServiceNow, you won't see anything within ServiceNow. Coincidentally if you set the From address to the default <instance>@service-now.com on the SMS notification, it appears this is a non-issue.

Thanks chahal@acxiom.com for posting the full error so I could find this and the related KB. I knew I couldn't be the only one seeing this issue. Opened a HI incident to help push for a solution.

[Chad Hall]

They implemented some sort of workaround a couple weeks ago so they are now being delivered successfully. From what I understand it was a temporary workaround but the permanent fix will be transparent and will only speed up the delivery. But the workaround is delivering them pretty fast so I went ahead and switched ours to go out directly through ServiceNow again.

[vanessa_sever]