AT&T Causing some Trouble for Total Connect Users

During the last few days, Alarm Grid customers who are using AT&T as their cell phone service provider have indicated to our support team that the messages are coming in from different phone numbers. While not a huge inconvenience for most Total Connect users, for those who have setup alerts based on the phone number from which the message is coming are probably not getting the audible notifications that the audible notification of a message from Total Connect has stopped. The way to get around the issue is to change your AT&T SMS email recipient in your Total Connect 'Users' settings to an email address instead. Use the email address of your 10-digit number@mms.att.net. As the Total Connect SMS radial button option is really just a front end that tells the AlarmNet service to send an email to your 10-digit number@txt.att.net, this email setup is essentially doing the same thing as the SMS radial button. However, the key difference, and the reason is solves the problem of the ever changing contact on the Total Connect messages is that by sending it as an email you are having the messages come through AT&T's MMS gateway instead of their SMS gateway. For whatever reason, this solves the problem and all your messages will come from the same contact: totalconnect2.0@alarmnet.com so that you can setup a unique ring tone for your critical Total Connect notifications.

EDIT (Nov 1): We have noticed that a number of Alarm Grid customers have stopped receiving Total Connect messages if they are using the AT&T SMS setup on Total Connect. This was just an inconvenience before, as the messages would come through but they just would come from a different contact every time. Now it seems it has turned into a more serious issue where the messages don't come through at all if they are set up as SMS.

We're not sure what is causing this to happen, but we are aware of the problem and are working with AlarmNet to implement a solution for anyone who is experiencing the outage. We will give an update here as soon as we hear more. In the mean time, if you do the MMS email trick that we posted above, the messages will come through.

EDIT (Jan 13): Unfortunately, we have received reports that now even with the AT&T emails being set up to go to the @mms.att.net email gateway, customers with AT&T cell phones have stopped getting their Total Connect messages. We are still waiting for a fix from AlarmNet but in the mean time, we have developed a workaround. If you add your Gmail address as a Total Connect email recipient (and validate it), you can then use Gmail's filtering and forwarding features to have the emails pass through the Gmail account on their way to the cell phone. For some reason, this seems to bypass whatever was blocking the messages originally. If you are familiar with setting up Gmail filtering in your account, feel free to do it. If you are not, or would rather we help you with it, please give us a call (888-818-7728) or email support@alarmgrid.com, and we will work with you to make sure that you can get your email and text alerts.