How to Get SMS Alerts from Trane Tracer SC / Tracer Synchrony

How to Get SMS Alerts from Trane Tracer SC / Tracer Synchrony

· by Sam Greenspan

You’re not the only one out there hunting for a new way to get SMS alerts from your Trane Tracer SC or Tracer Synchrony system — Trane themselves are pretty much in the same boat.

Trane’s own support team published a bulletin in 2025 acknowledging that email-to-text alarm notifications from Tracer systems are breaking. AT&T shut down its gateway. Verizon’s has been unreliable for over a year. If you’ve been routing Tracer SC or Tracer SC+ alarm emails to carrier addresses like 5551234567@vtext.com, you’ve probably already noticed the silence.

The good news: your Tracer system’s email alerting still works fine. The part that broke is the last mile: the carrier gateway that converted that email into a text on your phone. And that’s fixable without having to perform major surgery (or even minor surgery) on your BAS configuration.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to turn your Trane Tracer SC or Tracer Synchrony alarm emails into SMS text messages using a simple email-address swap. If you already have SMTP and alarm email routing configured, you’re looking at a few minutes of work. If you don’t, we’ll cover SMTP setup too.

Trane Tracer SC / Tracer Synchrony SMS Alerts: Table of Contents

Setting Up Text Alerts on Your Trane Tracer SC / SC+

Step 1: Sign up with text.email

We’ll use text.email, which is an email-to-text tool that works as a drop-in replacement for those carrier gateways that (as Tracer noted) no longer exist.

You send it an email, it shows up as a text on your phone.

It’s a quick process: Sign up, pick a private keyword for your account, and your delivery address becomes yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email. Any email sent to that address arrives as a text message.

We’re going to put this address into your Tracer SC’s alarm email routing.

Step 2: Make sure SMTP is configured on your Tracer SC

Your Tracer SC / SC+ needs a working SMTP server to send email at all. If you’re already receiving alarm emails from your system, SMTP is configured and you can skip to Step 3.

If you’re not sure, or if email alerts have never been set up on this system, here’s how to check and configure it.

Identify which SMTP path you’re using

Trane supports a few approaches for SMTP on Tracer SC and SC+ systems, and the right one depends on your setup:

  • Trane’s Digital SMTP server — Trane offers a managed SMTP service for Tracer SC+ / Synchrony systems. You request an account per building through Trane Connect (under Remote Access → Connect to a Device → Support/Feedback → Request Help). This is the path Trane recommends, and it’s the most straightforward if you have a Trane service agreement.
  • Your facility’s own mail server — If your building’s IT department runs Exchange, Microsoft 365, or another SMTP server, you can point the Tracer SC at it directly. You’ll need the server address, port, and authentication details from your IT team.
  • Gmail or another public SMTP server — Trane’s documentation recommends against this, citing visibility issues with delivery failures. That said, it works. If you go this route, you’ll need a Gmail App Password (Google killed regular password SMTP login in 2024). Enable 2-Step Verification on the Gmail account first, then generate an App Password at Google Account → App Passwords.

Configuring SMTP on the Tracer SC

Navigate to the Identification and Communications page in the Tracer SC interface. The SMTP settings live here — you’ll need to enter:

  • SMTP Server address (e.g., smtp.gmail.com or your facility’s mail server)
  • Port (587 for TLS, 25 for unencrypted)
  • Authentication credentials (username and password)
  • Sender email address

At this point,it’s smart to send a quick test email. Most Tracer SC interfaces have a test function in the SMTP configuration area. If the test email doesn’t arrive, the problem is SMTP, and nothing downstream will work until that’s resolved.

Step 3: Add your text.email address to the alarm email routing

Now that we have email-to-text and email notifications set up, we’re ready to connect the Tracer SC’s alarm system to SMS delivery. The Tracer SC uses BACnet Notification Classes and Alarm Email Routing Rules to control which alarms go to which recipients.

On Tracer SC / SC+ (via Tracer Synchrony interface):

  1. Navigate to Facility → Alarm Configuration.
  2. Go to Notification Classes. The Tracer SC comes with a default notification class (typically instance 127). You can view, edit, or create notification classes here. Each class defines recipients for three alarm states: To-Offnormal, To-Fault, and To-Normal.
  3. Go to Routing Alarm E-mail (also under Alarm Configuration). Click Add Routing Rule.
  4. In the routing rule, specify the notification class you want to route (e.g., the default class, or a custom one you’ve created for critical alarms) and the email recipient: enter your text.email address — yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email.
  5. Save the rule.

On Tracer Ensemble (if you’re using it as a supervisory layer):

Tracer Ensemble has its own alarm email routing that sits above the SC level. Navigate to Actions and Settings → Alarm Message Templates to configure email routing. The Ensemble routes through its own SMTP connection, so make sure that’s configured too.

If you were previously using carrier gateway addresses

If your existing routing rules already pointed to something like 5551234567@vtext.com, all you need to do is edit the existing routing rule and replace the carrier gateway address with your text.email address.

Leave everything else alone. The notification classes, alarm categories, and alarm types don’t need to change. You’re only changing where the email goes.

Step 4: Consider trimming your alarm message template

This is optional is probably worthwhile so you don’t blow through all your texts.

Trane’s default alarm email templates can be lengthy: subject lines with building names, timestamps, point paths, alarm categories, and URLs. That’s fine for email, but SMS has a 160-character limit per segment. Longer messages still deliver (they’ll arrive as multi-part texts), but concise messages are easier to read.

In the Tracer SC interface, go to Facility → Alarm Configuration → Alarm Message Templates. You can edit the template to strip out hyperlinks and reduce the content to the essentials: what alarmed, where, and when.

Trane’s own “text alerts are breaking” bulletin actually recommends this exact step (removing hyperlinks from alarm messages).

Step 5: Test it

Trigger a test alarm or use the SMTP test function. You should receive a text on your phone within seconds.

If you don’t:

  • Confirm the SMTP test email works on its own. If the base email isn’t sending, the problem is upstream of text.email. Check your SMTP config, DNS settings, and whether the Tracer SC can reach the internet on port 587 or 25.
  • Check the routing rule. Make sure the notification class in your routing rule actually matches the notification class assigned to your alarm points. The Tracer SC’s default is instance 127, but if someone has customized the notification classes, the routing rule needs to match.
  • Verify firewall/network access. Some facility networks restrict outbound SMTP from the BAS VLAN. If the Tracer SC can reach Trane Connect but can’t send email externally, outbound port 587 might be blocked. Your network admin can confirm.

Why the Tracer SC’s SMS Alerts Stopped Working

Tracer’s broken email-to-text situation isn’t some rare, unique case. Every system that relied on email-to-text alerts has been dealing with the same thing.

Text alerts are actually kinda hard to pull off.

What happened under the hood

The Tracer SC’s alarm texts were always just adapting emails. If you routed alarm emails to 5551234567@vtext.com, the SC’s SMTP server sent an email to Verizon’s gateway, and Verizon converted it to a text.

When Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile shut down those carrier gateways, the emails started bouncing or disappearing silently. Your Tracer SC is probably still sending them. They’re just not arriving.

Why Trane Connect’s alarm notification isn’t the same thing

Trane Connect does offer an Alarm Notification feature as part of their Intelligent Services. But it’s cloud-based monitoring through Trane’s infrastructure, and it sends notifications through Trane Connect’s interface rather than direct SMS to your phone.

The Tracer SC’s local SMTP-based email alerting doesn’t depend on Trane Connect or internet connectivity to your building’s local network, as long as the SMTP server is reachable. That’s a meaningful architectural difference for facilities where uptime matters.

Why creating your own SMS pipeline doesn’t make sense

You could theoretically skip text.email (or some other alert service you find) and set up your own email-to-SMS relay using Twilio or a similar API.

But sending application-to-person (A2P) SMS in the US now requires 10DLC registration (registering your business and campaign use case with The Campaign Registry, then waiting for carrier approval). The compliance overhead for “my chiller faulted, tell me about it” is the same as for a 50,000-message marketing campaign.

Trane Tracer SC Text Alerts: Next Steps

We built text.email because the carrier gateways died and the alternatives were either overkill or didn’t exist. It handles the carrier compliance so you don’t have to.

A monthly (or annual) plan gets you 200 SMS messages per month. But the number of messages isn’t really what’s important: It’s the reliability in the moment for that ONE message that saves everything.

(Because if 200 isn’t enough, your Trane system’s alerting configuration probably needs tightening. That’s what the notification class filtering is for.)

You can test it right now without signing up: send a test email to yournumber@text.email and you’ll receive the text in seconds.

Which Trane BAS Alarms Deserve a Text Message?

The Tracer SC’s notification class system gives you fine-grained control over which alarms route to which recipients. Use it. Not every alarm needs to wake someone up.

Text these

  • Chiller fault or safety shutdown
  • Freezestat trip
  • Building static pressure alarm
  • Fire / smoke alarm relay points
  • Loss of communication with critical unit controllers
  • Power failure / UPS failover
  • Space temperature high/low limits on critical zones (server rooms, clean rooms, pharma storage)

Consider texting

  • Condenser water high temperature
  • VFD fault on critical AHUs
  • Economizer failure during high-load conditions
  • Repeated unoccupied override failures
  • Chiller plant CPC application alarms

Leave on email

  • Scheduled maintenance reminders
  • Data log storage warnings
  • Non-critical setpoint deviations
  • Informational alarm-to-normal notifications
  • Filter change advisories

The notification class structure in the Tracer SC maps well to this. Create a dedicated notification class for critical alarms, assign it only to the points that matter, and route that class to your text.email address. Leave your broader notifications going to your regular email.

Trane Tracer SC / Tracer Synchrony Text Alerts: Ready to Get Started

Sign up at text.email, add your text.email address to a Tracer SC alarm routing rule (or replace the old carrier gateway address that stopped working), and filter your alarms to the events worth acting on immediately.

If you’re running a Tridium Niagara system alongside your Trane BAS, the setup process there is similar. And if you’re managing multiple buildings with different BAS platforms, text.email works the same way across all of them: any system that can send email can send you a text.

Try text.email free

Send an email to
your-number@text.email
and receive it as a text in seconds. No signup required.