Since 15.6.1 upgrade some texts are blocked

This gets tricky, but…

For "spam prevention" reasons, Verizon is known to accept some messages at their vtext.com gateway… that they don't bother to actually deliver.

Among other things, they will not forward on email that appears to come from a financial institution because 99% of emails to that gateway from "chase.com" for example are actually phishing attempts.

I can completely believe they may do the same for some messages coming from icloud.com given it's a free mail site; they may do the same for messages coming from say hotmail.com or gmail.com, too.

The easiest way to find out is to… contact Verizon. If you can reach a competent tech support person, they will be able to tell you by looking at their systems whether the email -> SMS message was received by their servers, and whether it was forwarded on to their SMS system.

They should be able to see that the message say came in from email but was not sent on; AT&T certainly can.

This is all getting even more complex as some carriers are also running their emails through something like SPAMAssassin which has its own logic as to whether it believes a message is spam or not that you will never see as vtext.com doesn't bounce SPAM email back to the sender, it silently discards it.

This is a link from 2016 discussing the blocking of email to text that appears to come from banking domains:

https://community.verizon.com/t5/Verizon-Messages/Not-receiving-messages-sent-to-myPhoneNumber-vtext-com/m-p/880768/highlight/true#M20608

Other threads show that if Verizon detects a higher than usual number of what it believes to be SPAM messages, it will just drop email to SMS messages from that domain; people trying to send SMS messages from a GMail account often find it will work and then one day will just stop working for some period of time, and it's because Verizon detected a high number of SPAM messages and is now blocking them. They won't answer further for "security reasons."

It's quite possible Verizon detected people creating iCloud email addresses and sending SPAM using them and decided to drop email to SMS service from icloud.com for some period of time.

Do you have another email address, like a corporate email address you could try using as the "from" address to see if the messages come through?

That should at least help narrow down whether it's Verizon's email to SMS gateway or your device.

One other possibility is since your message is always the same short text string, that may also have triggered Verizon's SPAM detection software, so you might want to try manually sending yourself a test message from that address with actual handwritten text of some other content, something like "This is a test to see if this message successfully makes it through the Verizon email to SMS gateway. Sent August 25, 2022 at 10:31:22."

Phillip Anthony wrote:

Thank you SO MUCH for responding to my query because this has/is causing a lot of stress and work disruption.

Here is a screen grab of the last test texts that I received.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/bc93224b-ee72-43d7-af77-075359248a3a

What you see are the few test texts that I received with message at the bottom. Normally, these texts would continue arriving until I stopped them.

At the top is my email address which I had not paid any attention to until the Verizon rep pointed it out to me. I am not certain how that plays into this issue at all because the email address that is embedded in the PHP script is "...@mac.com", so I have no idea how the "...@icloud.com" was added. Both are my correct email addresses, however.

To be clear, these texts do not originate from an email address, they come from a webpage that contains the text sending PHP script. The text verbage is meaningless at this point. The entire point of this aspect of this project is to be able to receive texts when water tank water levels fall to a dangerous level.

I hope this will help you determine who is blocking these texts. Thanks again for your help.

Hmmm that is strange that a webpage is sending to your email instead of phone number.

Have you double check the webpage and see if you can input your number instead of email to receive the text?

Phillip Anthony wrote:

How to I prevent Apple from blocking texts? I am sending test texts for an Arduino project I am working on and after the most recent upgrade I no longer receive these test texts. At the bottom of the last text stream I received was a message stating 'The sender is not in your contact list'.

So what if the sender is not in my contacts list? That is my business, not Apple's!!

I thought it was Verrizon that was blocking my texts, but after testing my iPhone their rep said it was not Verizon that was blocking these texts. He said it must be Apple that is blocking these texts.

Any help to remove this blockage will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Is your message green or blue text, if the latter that is imessage and would be an Apple issue, if the former then that is Verizon issue.

Apple doesn't care if a sender isn't in your contact list, I get plenty of text message from numbers I don't have, get codes from 3rd party software.

I'm on 15.6.1 as well, suggest you talk to someone higher up at Verizon and not a sales associate.

Phillip Anthony wrote:

Sorry for the confusion.

This is how it works: I have an Arduino test sketch that sends a POST request to an includes folder of my test website. This 'triggers' a file within this includes folder that sends a test text to my cell phone as follows:

=

client.println("POST /includes/text_send.php HTTP/1.1");

client.println("Host: www.mytestwebsite.com");

=

and what follows is the PHP file script within the includes folder:

=

$to = "XXXXXXXXXX@vtext.com"; // my cell #

$from = "XXXXXX@icloud.com"; // my email address

$message = "TIME! South tank is low!\n".$timestamp." \nSouth tank water level is ".$tank_height;

$headers = "From: $from\n";

mail($to, '', $message, $headers);

=

All of this is very basic PHP scripting. Again, this worked fine until the last iOS upgrade, so I have to believe that this text blockage is caused by the iOS upgrade and not by Verizon, but I have no proof that that assertion is correct. All I know with certainty is this text blockage began right after the iOS upgrade.

NOTE. I made a mistake when I commented about the email address at the top of the iPhone grab I posted above. Because I have been trying so many different things to try and resolve this issue, I have indeed used both 'xxxx@mac.com' and 'xxxx@icloud.com' email addresses in the $from code line seen above. So apparently the test texts received when I took the iPhone screen grab came from a PHP script that used that email address. My apologies for that oversight.

Thanks for sticking with me on this.

This is our of my territory now, maybe someone will hop in and give a response. But try contacting Apple, use the get support link at the top right of the forum.

Glad to be of help!