Monday, April 7, 2025

This is the sixteenth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Oh woe and sadness! I just learned that AT&T is ending its email to text service in June of this year. What is it and why is it important? Glad you asked! I am one of those odd people who doesn't use a smartphone on a daily basis. I use a flip phone that can text and make phone calls, and not much else. I tried to use it as an MP3 player but for some reason it plays the incoming text notification sound every time it changes tracks, and loudly. That didn't work.

Anyway, I remembered from even longer ago when I had an old Nokia candybar phone (that I modded to have a flip cover like the Matrix, of course) that I could send an email to my phone number and have it show up as an MMS message. When I got the phone I have now, I tried it out, and sure enough, it still worked! Not only could I send a message to my own email and have it in my inbox the next time I got on the computer, I could also send an address to my phone so I could enter it into my GPS, which stays in the car. And, when people send pictures in a group text, rather than break out the microscope to see them on my phone screen, I could just forward them to myself and see them later. But now, oh what a day, that service will be ending very soon.

Honestly, I can't blame them. Keeping old technologies alive is a difficult proposition at best. The software platform I work with at my day job is literally designed to move business processes out of old, outdated applications and into modern web server/client patterns. I've heard from plenty of clients how inconvenient it is to keep old systems around while trying to work with new ones at the same time. I judge that AT&T thinks its moving into the future, but there will always be those of us who are content to stay right where we are in the present.

Let's keep "old" technology alive! Reply to this email or send me a note at [email protected]. I promise I'll write back.