Many of you have reported problems delivering text messages to your members since early July. We have been investigating this issue as if it was a technical issue on the TroopTrack side and have been unable to find the root cause.
That's because there wasn't a root cause, at least not on the TroopTrack side.
TroopTrack text messaging uses an email-to-text service to send text messages. This is much less expensive than SMS messaging from a web application, and it's worked reasonably well over the years. For more than a decade, TroopTrack has relied on a service called Sendgrid to deliver emails to our users, and they have been a reliable and helpful service, albeit expensive.
Sendgrid was recently acquired by Twilio, a company whose largest product is SMS delivery. Effective July 1, they began blocking all email-to-sms email messages. They didn't inform us of this change - I figured it out by contacting their support desk.
They asked us to use their paid SMS service instead and clearly have no intention of allowing these emails.
As a result, we are no longer able to support text messaging from TroopTrack until we find another solution. We don't know how long that will take.
We encourage you to explore chatterboxes as an alternative way of communicating quickly over mobile devices. It is fast, reliable, and very inexpensive.
I will be disabling the text messaging feature in TroopTrack very soon.
Thank you for your understanding in this issue.
Best wishes,
Dave