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How to block texts from email addresses
Welcome to the future, you’re still getting spam text messages.
What’s worse, you’re getting trash texts from email addresses. So humanity is still innovating—only it’s about making life worse. But at least we have some tools to fight these blights. Let us tell you how to block them.
Although “we” is doing less of the work than it used to. The carriers have been quietly strangling the email-to-text gateways that made this possible in the first place—AT&T killed its own in June 2025, T-Mobile’s has been falling over since late 2024, and Verizon is winding its down too.
Which changes what you should actually do, depending on whose network you’re on.
Updated on: 05 October, 2026
How do you stop random emails from texting my phone?
The best and easiest way to stop texts from email addresses is to block them at the carrier level. Here’s how to do it with each provider:
What’s that weird text you received from an email address?
Spam texts from emails, also known as robotexts, are texts sent from an SMS gateway, a Third-Party Service, or a Chrome Extension connected to Gmail or a similar email service.
Here’s the mechanism, or what’s left of it.
Carriers used to run a public email-to-SMS gateway for every number they served. A spammer didn’t need your carrier’s permission, or yours—just your number and the gateway format, which was never a secret. T-Mobile’s was [10-digit-number]@tmomail.net, Verizon’s @vtext.com, AT&T’s @txt.att.net.
The past tense there is doing a lot of work. Wide-open gateways with no sender checks turned out to be a spam firehose, which is precisely why they’re being switched off.
By using an email address, spammers are able to send a massive amount of texts virtually for free even.
Each carrier had a specific email domain to use when emailing texts. If your number was 0987654321 on T-Mobile, then [email protected] would drop a text onto your handset. Simple.
And that’s why spammers loved it.
All you need to send a text from an email address is:
- The phone number.
- The carrier.
And your phone number is likely all over the internet, try to scan yourself.
That’s a different problem from ordinary text spam, and it needs a different fix.
Filtering unknown senders in your messaging app does nothing about a message that arrived through the gateway—you have to close the gateway itself.
The flip side is worth knowing too.
If your carrier has already closed its gateway and you’re still getting texts that look like they came from an email address, the gateway isn’t how they reached you. That’s ordinary spam in a costume, and our main spam text guide is the place to deal with it.
Verizon
Welcome to the big leagues of spam prevention. Verizon lets you turn off email-to-text messages entirely—no more texts from [email protected].
Here’s how:
- Text “OFF” to 4040. That’s it. You just turned off email-to-text like flipping a switch.
- Want to make sure it worked? Text “STATUS” to 4040.
- Regret it? Text “ON” to 4040 and the messages will flood back in. (But… why?)
Verizon still documents this switch, so it’s worth flipping. Do note that vtext is living on borrowed time regardless—Verizon calls it a legacy consumer platform and has been tightening its filters for a while now.
AT&T
Nothing to do here, and for once that’s the good news.
AT&T shut down email-to-text and text-to-email on June 17, 2025, across AT&T Wireless, Cricket, FirstNet, and business accounts. The @txt.att.net and @mms.att.net addresses simply stopped resolving.
So nobody is reaching your handset through the AT&T gateway, because there isn’t one to reach it through. There’s no switch left to flip. If junk is still arriving that looks like it came from an email address, it’s getting in by some other route—which puts you back in the territory our main spam text guide covers.
T-Mobile
T-Mobile sits somewhere in the middle, which is the least helpful place to sit.
The old advice was to log into My T-Mobile, find Communication Tools, and build an email filter. That menu belongs to a version of the site that no longer exists, so don’t go hunting for it.
Meanwhile, tmomail.net has been unreliable since late 2024 and widely reported as dead through 2026. T-Mobile hasn’t named a shutdown date, but it describes the gateway as a legacy system that may eventually be decommissioned, which is corporate for “don’t get attached.”
If messages are still landing on your line, look for the call and message blocking controls in your T-Mobile account profile—or just ask support, which will be quicker than guessing at menus.
Where carrier-level blocking is still on offer, take it. It’s free. It’s fast. And it’s the closest thing to digital pest control you’ll find.
Closing the gateway is only a patch
Switching off email-to-text—or having your carrier switch it off for you—closes one door. It does precisely nothing about the reason spammers had your number to begin with.
That number is on lists. Data brokers compile them, sell them, and resell them, and whoever buys one will cheerfully try whatever delivery method still works: a short code, a 10-digit number, a gateway somewhere that hasn’t been shuttered yet.
Incogni sends removal requests to the 420+ data brokers behind those lists, and keeps sending them. That thins out the supply, rather than blocking one route into your phone and waiting for the next one.
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FAQ
Why am I getting texts from email addresses?
You’re getting texts from email addresses because of one or several of these factors:
– You shared your phone number publicly, probably via social media.
– A legitimate company you gave your number to suffered a data breach.
– You gave out your number on a scam website.
A data broker that has gathered your number is reselling it in bulk, and it ended up on a spammer’s list.
Do email-to-text gateways still work?
Mostly not. AT&T shut its gateway down in June 2025, T-Mobile’s has been failing since late 2024 and is described by the company as a legacy system, and Verizon’s vtext service is being wound down. Texts that look like they came from an email address are increasingly arriving by other routes instead, so the fix is ordinary spam filtering rather than carrier-level gateway blocking.
