Posted by tcrhelpforsms 10/26/2024
Ask HN: Escape from TCR? Family shared SMS
And as with many things in life, human nature has pretty much ruined it. To combat SMS spam, as far as we can tell, all business SMS usage needs to be approved through https://www.campaignregistry.com/ now. And recent years, it has been brought to our attention that the service we are paying for is really intended for businesses. We are increasingly hitting weird blocks on messaging due to being grandfathered in before TCR. It has gotten to the point where we are on the verge of registering a business just to keep our functionality. Except even just having a registered business may not be enough because TCR requires all kinds of detailed information about your business and its practices.
So we are at a bit of a loss what else to do here. We could concede and one of us gets the responsibility of the "designated" cell phone number to handle everything household related. It is further complicated by my being an Apple fanboi and her a Windows/Android zealot. If we both used Apple devices we could maybe finagle something out by buying a dedicated iPhone for the house number and then take advantage of the cross-device Messages interoperability. There is Google Voice, and even ignoring my dislike for them, I don't feel they can necessarily be trusted not to drop the product or ban us for arbitrary reasons. Additionally, when it comes to actual phone calls, while Google Voice can forward calls to a number, I am not aware of any option to use it directly with regular handsets like many VoIP providers offer.
Are there really no companies in this space serving personal users? If not, that would be an excellent business niche for the entrepreneural folks in the audience.
My phone # is a VoIP that forwards to my T-Mobile cell. SMS stopped reaching my phone because T-Mobile silently dropped them. I now forward them to my AT&T # (as long as I can) and to my email.
TCR explainer: The Campaign Registry is an industry-led effort to reduce spam, mostly spearheaded by T-Mobile. It isn't fully baked and is far too simplistically implemented.
It is supposed to (only) apply to SMS originating from biz. However, it is a wide and leaky net that captures both more and less than it should.
SMS from biz that pay/register with the TCR are unfettered; they can mass message. SMS sent from consumers via wireless carriers (like T-Mobile) are similarly unmolested.
But SMS sent from VoIP services (that compete with wireless carriers) get interpreted as biz-originated and get dropped silently.
Past that, another major issue with TCR is that it doesn't meaningfully discriminate between major SMS campaigns and the most minimal+routine SMS usage.
My biz clients provide product support to their customers and a handful of SMS messages may be involved. Even so, they are required to jump thru the same hoops as huge entities that send millions of SMS.
Within that context, I found that registering and working with TCR was so onerous/expensive that we're 1) ignoring it as long as we can and 2) considering workarounds.
If so, I’m guessing a good chunk of the US would pay for an app that silences the notifications and auto-responds STOP.
The TCR is a list that wireless carriers use to decide if they'll let a SMS message proceed or not.
I doubt the message itself indicates that it was weighed against the TCR list (it would require modifying the message).
Caveat: T-Mobile blocks outgoing GV calls from my handset 100% of the time. I have to turn on a VPN to make a GV call.
Luckily that's only happened twice in 4+ years and both times they had an email recovery flow.
They have SIP support as well as an online SMS/MMS portal you can access from desktop or mobile. The only issue is they are still working on support to receive MMS by SIP protocol which might eliminate them from your consideration. You can send MMS by SIP currently though.
Phone number is only $0.85/month and then pay-per-usage of $0.0075/SMS and $0.02/MMS. Probably cheap enough to purchase a number to test it out to see if it will meet your needs. I've used them for years, have had no issues, and am happy with their service.
The only knock on using voip.ms is the initial setup is a little tedious and you need to understand the basics of how they are working with each part of the VOIP protocol. Their FAQs and guides are pretty well written to help you get set up.
I start with voip.ms and see if they meet my needs due to great customer service as well as low price and high stability. Then I look elsewhere if I need something voip.ms doesn't support.
edit: spacing for readability
AFAIK, being grandfathered in before TCR isn't a thing. The blocking is inconsistent because the enforcement is inconsistent.
TCR enforcement (filtering SMS) is done by carriers who choose to use it on their services.
Primarily, TCR lists are used by wireless carriers, to filter SMS messages before they reach handsets. Primarily, that carrier is T-Mobile.
TCR is mostly a T-Mobile effort and they are it's largest enforcer. I have a T-Mobile number and a VoIP number.
I used to have SMS to my VoIP be forwarded to my T-Mobile - until T-Mobile began dropping 100% of those messages.
I have a dual SIM phone and SMS are now forwarded to my AT&T number. For now, they're arriving. If that stops, I'll have them forwarded to my Google Voice number.
I don't know if AT&T or Verizon currently utilize TCR filtering. They may, somewhat. If not, I'd guess they will but won't fully adopt T-Mobile's model.
It should be noted that VoIP providers are a primary competitor to T-Mobile; I am not at all surprised T-Mobile would single them out. It fits with T-Mobile's other anti-competitive practices - like blocking Google voice calls from handsets (ex:mine).
You install it on a real Android phone and then it's supposed to let you send and receive SMS from another device, acting as a proxy of sorts.
Personally, I use messages.google.com to answer texts from my computer, but I think you can only pair it to one device at a time. Maybe host that alongside an Android phone at home, and then stream that window to other browsers...? Super janky, I know.
Or you might be able to reverse engineer their UI or API calls and use something like Playwright to control the web interface and write your own external-facing API for it... what a lot of work, though
family home management and communication routing in general is a blank space with almost nothing. it extends into every market. childrens medical bills only appearing in one of two parents accounts etc. communication from an entity to a family is ripe for disruption and standardization.
have you looked at business support tools such as https://missiveapp.com/blog/what-is-sms-shared-inbox
<joke>curious where you and your wife stand on tabs vs. spaces</joke>
I'd need to check, but I'm on team spaces and I think she is on team tabs.
You can leave the cheap phone plugged in at home all the time and both of you will get any texts that come to the phone. You could set it up to reply to your phone and have it forwarded also.
Someone with the phone number A texts a message to number B. Say the message is forwarded to number C. In order for the user with device C to respond to A, it would first be necessary for B to rewrite the message text to say that the message came from A. They then the user of C needs to make sure to manually send the message to A. Now, depending on how savvy the user of A happens to be, they might not find it completely disorienting. If you were to attempt to send to both A and B via a group text that might help some. But then you'll also be getting extra copies of your messages fed back to you from B. Unless the forwarding on B is also smart enough to filter them. And then there is still the problem that in future conversations, the user of A might just send messages directly to C, bypassing the other forwarding recipients of B, defeating the point of having a shared point of contact.
So forwarding has considerable awkwardness and room for error.
But in any case I think proxying is absolutely possible and would b easy to setup, especially on a rooted phone.
The first thing that comes to mind is setting up a web frontend, so messages would be forwarded to your s and your wifes phones, and then you would access a web frontend hosted on the phone with the $ simcard with a 'real' number which would send out the reply sent via the web form.
Would something like that not work?
Anveo used to forward SMS to T-Mobile numbers but stopped last year (due to T-Mobile+TCR).