There was a post here over the weekend saying that Verizon was shutting down the SMS @vtext.com system in the near future and looking for alternatives to texts for alerts/notifications.
For over a decade, I have used a free Gmail account solely as the recipient for email alerts from both home and work monitoring systems. I use different smart phone email apps for real email and alerts, so there is no confusion about the sound when an alert comes in. Since you want multiple recipients, you could set up the same Gmail account on multiple devices so that anyone can delete the alerts…
Interesting…i will find out more tomorrow. I have worked for them as an engineer for 27 years and have not heard of that BUT i also do not work in sales who usually hear about the changes before we do! LOL
Apparently it appears to be true. I just texted my work phone and my personal one using @VTEXT and nothing, neither came through. I just gave a retail worker a ride along last week, she want’s to get into network. I will reach out to her in the morning and see what she can find out from her side of the company.
I wanted out of band notification capabilities. I’ve utilized email and SMS via a tmoble relay number. The email works great but the SMS was spotty. As such I moved on to utilizing whatsapp. It’s a reasonable alternative to SMS.
I will need to check… if not I think there is a way with some work for me to use my Synology NAS to send out messages. I know I can get messages when my NAS is on UPS power so that has to be possible. I just got a few yesterday when I shut off breakers to replace an outlet with a smart outlet. SO YES it has to be working in some manner.
I use a service called Twilio for getting both SMS and voice phone call messages from HA. The cost is pretty cheap. they only charge $1 per month for a phone number that they create for you to use as the source and like 0.001 per message. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and I think it’s only cost me less than $30. But I don’t use it every day. Only important stuff gets sent to others that don’t have the HA app.
Got it all solved, using the notifications feature. There is only one person in the family who does not have HA on their phone so that will need to wait till I can either figure it out or just install HA on their phone with no admin rights. Not sure if they will get notifications when off of the LAN though if they don’t have remote log in rights.
Not sure if this helps, but I hav programed an microcontroller wiht GSM-module to commuincate with HA over MQTT. This way I can send SMS with HA trough MQTT and the GSM-module.