Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring

[Rick Kunkel <kunkel () w-link net>]

Hello folks,

First off, apologies if this is off topic.  I'm hoping that system and
network monitoring tip are enough of a common issue that this falls under
the group's charter.

We've traditionally used mobile phone email addresses for system
notifications, but over the past 6-12 months, it seems to have become
increasingly sketchy.

For instance, if an application fails to contact a certain service on a
certain server, it sends an email (through it's own SMTP service, to avoid
a chicken-and-egg prob if/when our main SMTP service fails) to
1234567890 () tmomail net.  (Obviously, that was a fake number.)  More and
more, I'm getting less and less of these notifications.

It seems especially prevalent when MANY things are sent at once; if, for
example, a central piece fails, and dependent pieces suddenly fail as
well.

I try to telnet to mailx.tmomail.net port 25 and get sometimes good,
sometimes laggy, and sometimes no response.  T-Mobile, support levels all
the way up to 3 tell me that it's not them, and everything should work
wonderfully.

Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this?

Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of thing?

Thanks,

Rick Kunkel