AT&T Email-to-Text Going Away June 17th, 2025

[Casey23]

According to AT&T, they are going to be retiring the email to text and text to email capabilities. Support article: https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1061254/

We have a case open with support, but curious if anyone has any official word on what ServiceNow is planning to do (if anything) with this news? Or what is your organization planning to do after this time for users receiving email to text messages with AT&T as their provider?

I know that ServiceNow offers the Twilio Spoke application as a paid solution, but this seems like overkill for something as simple as sending a text message.

[Casey23]

According to support, there is no official communication from ServiceNow and other than recommending Twilio, they have no other information to provide.

Is anyone using another solution besides Twilio? I know there are a bunch of other SMS gateway products out there, but not exactly sure how to implement their API when sending notifications to individual users vs how we do it today using the out-of-box options. AKA a notification device tied to a notification.

[JohnDHarper]

Don't know if you are a Microsoft shop, but if all the target recipients for the emails are internal and have access to Microsoft Teams or similar enterprise messaging, maybe could pivot to emailing a team channel in your messaging app instead.  Participants would want to have the mobile app installed.

Send an email to a channel in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Support

In a prior role I worked on SMS integration into a custom application, and we used RingCentral APIs.  They had good documentation and it seemed to work well, but it did get pricey when we had a lot of SMS messages generated.  This path is just like the Twilio suggestion you mentioned, however.

[Casey23]

Thanks for the reply! I had seen a few people mention using Teams, but most of the messages we're looking to send are on-call notifications, SLA warnings, and a few others that are mainly for individuals vs a group. We only have a couple of SMS notifications going to a group.

Somewhat related, we know that notifications from the agent app would work, but the problem with that is you can't specify to alert only on high priority notifications (to my knowledge at least). We could manage that on the admin side by preventing non-urgent notifications from going to the app I suppose, but for those out there who want all of their notifications showing up from the app, this wouldn't be a benefit to them. 

We are also looking at a few 3rd party apps we use elsewhere in the organization for SMS messaging since it seems like Twilio requires Integration Hub, and we don't have it.

[Casey23 · Accepted solution]

Since ServiceNow isn't planning anything for this, I figured I'd share a brief overview what we ultimately ended up doing.

• We decided to go with Clickatell as our SMS gateway provider since we already use them for other things in our organization
• If a notification is triggered by an event we created a script action, and if a notification is triggered by conditions in the notification, we created a business rule
• We have a system property that houses the sys_id for ATT/Cricket, since those are the carriers we care about in this instance (this allows us to add other carriers if they drop their gateway support, without having to update each script action or business rule)
• Whether it's a business rule or a script action, we're checking the recipients notification device(s) to figure out who the carrier is, and if it's found in the system property, we send the message via Clickatell (this helps us to reduce costs by not sending EVERY SMS message through Clickatell)
• If the carrier isn't in the system property, then we use ServiceNow to email the SMS device like we did prior to the change
• We also created a business rule that looks at outbound messages using the email to SMS method, removes recipients with the carriers in the system property, and then processes the message with the remaining recipient (this ensures that after we went live with Clickatell, there aren't duplicate notifications being sent to ATT/Cricket customers)
• We can leave these scripts active after a clone and prevent notifications from being sent out of non-PRD environments, by checking the instance URL, and each script action or business rule will return if it's not in PRD (for testing purposes, that code can be commented out)

Hopefully this helps, but if anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer them!