Has anyone else run into problems with cell phone companies that use both an MMS and SMS gateway when trying to send text notifications to patrons? We initially set up Cricket in our Phone Carrier settings as sms.mycricket.com, but we are starting to get bouncebacks saying “User has moved to @mms.cricketwireless.net.” However, we aren’t getting bouncebacks for EVERY Cricket customer, only some of them. It’s as though what messaging gateway is active depends on the individual customer. I’ve poked around online and can’t find anything from Cricket on what the situatoin is.
We could list both gateways separately as Phone Carrier options in sysadmin settings, but I doubt the typical patron knows which gateway they are using or that the typical front-line staff member could remember to ask on top of the 1,000 other things they have to remember when registering a new patron.
Has anyone else run into this? How are you currently delivering text notices to patrons who are Cricket customers?
However, there have also been posts saying only about 40% to 60% of messages get through. You might also want to check the length of your messages. Maybe some titles or branch names are causing the standard SMS message to be too long which is why it needs to go over the MMS.
Over the past year, carriers have made MAJOR changes to their delivery of text messages in attempts to cut down on text SPAM (and to make more money for themselves). This includes needing to register your brand as well as the purpose you’re using to send the texts.
I believe that Vega LX Notices is intended to help with this but there are also other options you may want to investigate as I’m not sure of the status of that feature set.
These “helpers” usually come in the form of “central” email to SMS gateways. With those, your Polaris set up has one entry for all carriers like @sms-gateway.com , so staff and patrons only have ONE thing to select.
We don’t have Cricket up here in Canada (at least, not this part of Canada) - but we’ve had similar struggles with a couple of local carriers. We eventually had to move away from email to SMS / MMS altogether and we now send text messages directly.
Our Consortium uses MessageBee from Unique for this and it works well with each library system having its own phone number and ability to customize our own notices. We also use MessageBee for email and telephone notices. @EleanorC would have more information on the setup process as she’s at our consortium office but from a member library perspective it’s very functional and much more stable than email to SMS.