I routinely communicate with other people from my e-mail account by sending an e-mail message to their phone as a text message. I do this using the SMS gateway provided by the carrier.
As an example, I send an e-mail, from Thunderbird (not a text message, a regular e-mail message) to an address that looks like this:
nnnnnnnnnn@mms.att.net
where the sequence before the @ symbol is the ten-digit mobile phone number. The SMS gateway converts the e-mail message into a text message (or multimedia message) for delivery to the phone.
All of the major carriers have this type of gateway. For Verizon, it is nnnnnnnnnn@vtext.com
And the phone user can reply. And when they do, I receive an e-mail from the address described above.
This has worked well for years. Only now have I begun to experience problems when receiving messages sent from an AT&T iPhone.
The message arrives in my inbox, and it appears to be blank. It shows the originating e-mail address, as described above, but no text or other data appears in the body of the message.
But if I click Forward in Thunderbird, then the text of the message magically appears in the body of the forwarded message.
Anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this? I am experiencing this with more than one user, and they both have an iPhone on the AT&T network.
Clearly the message IS getting delivered, but for some reason it is not displaying properly in Thunderbird. My guess is that it has something to do with the formatting...
FYI: changing the view from "original HTML" TO "simple HTML" to "plain text" does not resolve the issue.
Environment: Win 7 Pro 32 bit; Thunderbird Portable version 45.8.0
Additional info that I suspect might help solve this mystery: My e-mail is IMAP on the Godaddy network. It is NOT gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com, or any of those. It is my own domain.
When I check my e-mail using Godaddy Webmail (not Office 365, legacy webmail) the message does not display in the body of the e-mail, but it comes in as a text file attachment, which I have to open using Notepad. And I can read it that way with no problem...
Thanks