It used to be that cellphones would allow you to send an email to a person’s phone number, and it would be received as a text message. And the reverse also worked: someone could send a text to an email address, and that message would arrive in the recipient’s inbox. But no longer. Please know: Email-to-Text is being discontinued.
TL;DR: if you want to email someone, send an email to their email address. If you want to text someone, send it from your texting app to their phone number. Do not mix the two communication methods, as your messages may not go through. And you may not be notified of any failure.
What Happened‽
The three big carriers, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon, decided to kill off this feature.
T-Mobile didn’t really announce the death of this feature, but it began to fail on their network in late 2024/early 2025. T-MO only vaguely references email-to-text in some of their policy statements.
AT&T did make an announcement, and they posted about it officially on their website. They scuttled email-to-text as of 6/17/2025.
Verizon began slowly scuttling this feature in late 2024, and anticipates it will be done as of 3/31/2027. Many T-MO users may find that it is already blocked for their mobile devices.
Smaller carriers may still offer this feature, but we should expect email-to-text to become fully extinct in the near future.
Security and Spam
Cellular carriers moved away from email-to-text service for two main reasons: there were growing security concerns and too much spam.
Emails sent to phone numbers, and texts sent to email addresses were less secure than other communications. Senders couldn’t be verified and protective sending rules couldn’t be enforced. This turned into worries about liability and the potential for litigation.
And the spammers seized on the weaknesses of the email-to-text infrastructure. They exploited the lax security and enjoyed easy anonymity with this type of messaging. There was little the carriers could do to about this.