On 9/6/07, Rick Kunkel <kunkel@w-link.net> wrote:

[snip]

We've traditionally used mobile phone email addresses for system
notifications, but over the past 6-12 months, it seems to have become
increasingly sketchy.

[snip]

Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this?

Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of thing?


We tend to avoid the whole SMTP mess and deliver messages to mobiles and pagers via a modem and the provider's TAP gateway.  It works quite well with Verizon and AT&T/Cingular, but I've no experience with T-Mobile.  It also avoids the whole mess of failing to alert when your monitoring box has a bad NIC, cable, switchport, etc - of course considering that you trade those for problems with a serial port, cable, modem, or phone line...  But it gives us a big (and perhaps false) warm fuzzy that our alerting is 'out of band' relative to our upstream Internet connections.

The folks at Avtech have a nice index of TAP gateway numbers at http://www.avtech.com/Support/TAP/index.htm

Hope you find this useful...

--D