Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- AT&T is shutting down its email-to-text and text-to-email services on June 17, 2025.
- The feature lets users send texts via email and receive texts as emails using special AT&T addresses.
- While some found it useful, many are glad it’s going away, calling it a spam magnet that overstayed its welcome.
AT&T is quietly retiring a couple of its long-standing, if under-the-radar, features. The carrier has announced that its email-to-text and text-to-email services will be shut down starting June 17, 2025, and not everyone is sad to see them go.
In case you’ve never used them, these services allow you to send and receive text messages via email. All you had to do was type in a phone number followed by @txt.att.net or @mms.att.net, and your message would be delivered as an SMS or MMS to an AT&T user. Similarly, users could receive incoming texts as emails. It was a straightforward system that served as a handy bridge between text messaging and email, especially before the rise of modern messaging apps.
Reddit user ben305 appears to have been the first to spot and share the shutdown notice in a post on the r/ATT subreddit. “I didn’t catch this news anywhere else on the entirety of the internet,” they wrote, after discovering the update while troubleshooting an email-to-SMS issue. They also noted that AT&T hadn’t sent any notification about the deprecation, a sentiment echoed by others in the thread.
“Having @mms.att.net / @txt.att.net was nice to have for nearly 20 years,” the Redditor wrote, adding that although they didn’t depend on the feature for anything critical, its disappearance came without any fanfare. The official support page notice itself reads like a brief memo:
That’s about as much explanation as customers have gotten so far. Notably, this change also affects Cricket Wireless users. Messages sent to @txt.cricket.net or @mms.cricket.net will stop working as well.
Despite its age, the service still has a loyal niche following. Some users in the Reddit thread shared that they had used it regularly, particularly for receiving alerts or notifications back in the day. Others, however, seemed relieved, with many pointing out that the service had become a spam magnet, and some even shared that they had previously asked AT&T to deactivate it for that very reason.
And that’s likely part of the reason for its demise. While AT&T hasn’t offered an official explanation, low usage and the uptick in spam traffic may have made the feature more of a hassle than a benefit to maintain. It’s also telling that, so far, many customers appear to have received no formal notice from the company, just a quietly updated support article.
So, are you going to miss AT&T’s email-to-text services? Or are you among those who were glad to see the back of them? Let us know if, and how, you used the feature in the comments.
