AT&T shuts down long-running text-to-email services

By Patrick Hearn Published March 27, 2025

If you’re an AT&T customer, you’ve long been able to send and receive texts through email (even if you didn’t realize it.) The company now says it’s going to sunset this feature on June 17, 2025. That’s not necessarily bad news, however; as many users point out, text-to-email services can result in a surprising amount of spam messages making it through email filters.

The closure announcement came with little fanfare. Many people weren’t even aware AT&T was discontinuing the feature until Reddit user u/ben305 shared a post on the r/ATT subreddit. All AT&T’s official website says is, “On June 17, 2025, our email-to-text and text-to-email service is going away. This means you won’t be able to use email to send or receive texts. Also, others who have AT&T WirelessSM won’t be able to use email to send you a text or use text to send you an email.”

The service is also going away from any Cricket subscribers.

Though some Reddit users lamented the loss of the service, most took it in stride. User u/garylapointe said, “It doesn’t seem like it’s been working very well the past couple of years, so that’s probably a good thing.” On the other hand, user u/nothing_2_talk_about said, “I use this feature all the time! I have my email set to forward to text to alert me of safety alerts from the filtering software we use to monitor my students.”

Most other major carriers provide a similar service. Verizon still offers something along the same lines, although the company has since retired its email service. T-Mobile also allows customers to send texts to devices from email addresses by using the format “[email protected],” where “phonenumber” is replaced with the ten-digit number.

While once useful, most people have drifted away from text-to-email and vice-versa in recent years. Other services like Pushover have essentially replaced this feature, and they do so without the spam risk that has long become synonym with email-to-text.