41
votes
T-Mobile SMS is filtering tildes.net
I just noticed that when I sent an invite to family member over SMS it never arrived. After experimenting it looks like if text contains "tildes.net" it is filered. This also happens with another family member's phone. It is weird why would those companies want to filter it.
I also checked and the message didn't show up in spam & blocked. Does anyone else observe the same thing?
Does it filter out other urls? It's more than likely a false positive that flags your message as spam
behaw.org went through, I didn't even add http/https in front of tildes.
I did more tests and "tildes.ne" and "ildes.net" goes through but "tildes.net" never arrives.
Edit: I tried two different messaging apps on both phones (textra SMS and chomp SMS) and it is still filtered, so I suspect it is probably tmobile, not sure why though.
Is it just invites (https://tildes.net/register?code=) that get filtered, or does every link from tildes.net get filtered?
Just presence of "tildes.net" in the message blocks the entrie message.
I tried "ildes.net" and "tildes.ne" and those arrive successfully. I'm wondering that maybe there were more people like me sending invite to family and friends and tmobile thought it was spam?
Edit: I just sent link to this post (https://tildes.net/~tildes/17g2/google_messages_andros_texting_app_or_t_mobile_is_filtering_tildes_net#comments) and it was also blocked.
I just sent that link to my wife. Both of us are on T-Mobile. She got the text message right away.
Ok that's even more puzzling, it happens for me every time. I don't even know who to reach if it was tmobile.
BTW: just to be sure, you are using tmobile in the US? As they also operate in other countries.
Correct, T-Mobile in the US, California specifically.
I did a quick test as well (TMobile in US) and text with "Tildes.net" did not go through but another test message after did (from android -> iphone via SMS)
Interestingly on this past Thursday I shared an invite but that was via RCS, and it had no problems.
I also tried texting myself but no texts came through, which they have in the past
Huh. Bizarre. Does the short-URL (https://tild.es/) get filtered too?
This one works
Well that's good at least. Unfortunately it appears that you can't share invite codes using the shortener. But at least you can share topic links using that.
@Deimos, is there any reason in particular that the shortener doesn't work with the invite codes (they lead to 404, E.g.)? If not, should I add an Gitlab issue for it to help with issues like the one OP is experiencing?
I don't think so, the shortener isn't intended to be a general-purpose alternative domain for the site. It's annoying that the invite links are getting blocked in this specific method, but there are a lot of alternatives for sending someone a link (or just sending the invite code alone and explaining how to register). They could easily just block tild.es too even if we made it work.
TMobile (and Twilio) have this heavy text filtering. My company had to move off their (Twilio) phone service after they thought we were texting about cannabis. Then they blocked some numbers. The filtering is very inconsistent. TMobile in NM calling TMobile in OR failed but the same source calling to TMobile in WA worked.
It appears to be a carrier issue: I sent a few SMS with different Tildes URLs (
tild.es, atildes.netpost link, and an invite code link) both to and from my carrier phone number (US Cellular) from/to my Google Voice number and they all went through.This is on a Pixel 6 Pro with the Google Messages app.
If it was the Messages app filtering it, you would be able to find it in the spam folder.
Tmobile changed their algorithm/auto-blocking for shortlinks last week (presumably in an attempt to combat spam), and is likely blocking tildes shortlinks. This is carrier specific - most, if not all of the big telco companies block the common url shorteners (ie.
bitly), but Tmobile has gotten more aggressive recently