Text messages should be sent as actual texts and not emails to a email-to-text service

Many carriers like Rogers (large carrier in Canada) don't treat email-to-text the same as text messages to reduce spam through the email-to-text system. As a result, messages get marked as spam, and require multiple steps of approval prior to a parent being able to see the message on their phone. See the images below to see how arduous and suspicious this process appears for parents (preventing real notifications from hitting parent's phones).


These text notifications must be sent out as real texts. There is no excuse for using email-to-text when it is supposed to be a text message notification (except marginal cost savings). We really can't use this service for anything useful until this is fixed - which is unfortunate because Blackbaud is the perfect place we would want these notifications to go out from.


For reference, here is Blackbaud's response in the ticket:




"...Our internal team has advised that the notifications are working as designed which in this case is to be sent from an email address, to the email version of a phone number. For Verizon for example, this would be 123456789@vtext.com -- then, each individual service provider may handle this differently, where some may show the "from email" as a multi media message (MMS) or it gets converted to an SMS and sent from one of the carrier's numbers. The ability for Blackbaud to send the notifications via Text rather than Email to Text would be considered an enhancement request for our development team."



  • Nathan Still
  • Oct 21 2022
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