We use nagios for monitoring at work and I got woken up this morning by a not so helpful message:
Time: 07:00:01
Info: Connection refused
Normally this would have been much more useful, as in the past the AT&T SMS gateway put text like "FRM: nagios SUBJ: servername/servicecheck is CRICITAL" in the message body. Anyone else seeing this change today, or know why the gateway behavior seemed to change?
I'm not sure about THIS specific problem but I do know that AT&T has been having problems with their SMS the past few days.
The AT&T forums have several people saying they're getting messages from phone numbers they don't even know, etc.
One guy said he got pictures from his girlfriend... but the phone number was NOT hers. He was NOT confusing it with the number that appears when the pic is sent from an email address.
Another person said they were receiving text messages from out of state people who were claiming that HIS/HER number had sent them a text message... yet his phone had no record of sending anything out.
Finally, one person had an issue where the to/from/subject was missing or all screwed up. This one sounds most like your problem.
Long story short... this "seems" to be an error and not a planned change.
My recommendation would be that you call AT&T and ask them about it before you go making any configuration changes on your end.
Good Luck!
The most likely answer is that AT&T is reconfiguring their servers for MMS on the iPhone. It is supposed to be rolled out by September the 25th.
I sent "pages" to my cell phone, similarly as you, by sending messages to 5555555555@cingularme.com or 5555555555@txt.att.net.
Two days ago it changed the "from" number and also replaced "FRM:" with "WebSender:", while keeping the "SUBJ:" and "MSG:" lines. According to the posts here, if your cell phone "email" address is in the CC or BCC lines, it leaves off the address that it is sending from. Nice, huh?
Hopefully this is just the initial implementation, and they will fix these problems in the near future.
AT&T reported to me that it was an issue with Verisign as they send email to TXT messages through Verisign. Verisign was having latency or dropping parts of messages. They said outage was first reported evening of Sep. 16th and no definitive date on when it will be fixed (possibly 24-48 hours)