The Email Delivery Guru

This article from the CTA Tattler blog points out that Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus riders who use US Cellular are currently unable to obtain bus tracking info via SMS. The issue supposedly relates to a problem with the CTA's SMS partner, TextMarks.

Reading between the lines, I wonder if perhaps there is a spam blocking issue here. Maybe this specific carrier is unhappy with some practice the CTA is engaged in, or perhaps some other TextMarks client has done something that raised the carrier's ire and resulted in them blocking all text messaging functionality between the carrier and the partner's clients. (I don't mean to imply that this is proof that TextMarks did something wrong. I don't know anything about them. I'm theorizing.)

Because there are so few mobile carriers (compared to how many webmail and ISPs in the land of email), an inability to deliver SMS messages to any single carrier can cut you off from being able to contact a significant portion of your SMS subscriber base. There are perhaps a dozen "SMS postmasters" compared to thousands (or maybe even millions) of "email postmasters" out there.

I think this is a reminder that it's so important to make sure you keep everything clean, clearly opt-in, and don't do anything that is going to go against the rules laid out by the various carriers and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). I'm sure this issue will be addressed eventually, but it would have been much better to avoid it all together. Chicago is US Cellular's biggest market, and this issue has a huge negative impact to both the CTA and bus riders.