How to Get SMS Alerts from How to Get Text Alerts from Honeywell EBI Alarms

How to Get SMS Alerts from How to Get Text Alerts from Honeywell EBI Alarms

· by Sam Greenspan

The Alarm Pager module in Honeywell EBI was designed to keep building engineers in the loop when they’re away. It routes alarms to email, to SNMP traps, and — in theory — to pagers and mobile phones.

I say “in theory” because the mobile phone part hasn’t worked reliably for a while now.

The cell phone carrier gateways it depended on are gone (more on that later in this article), the GSM modem path requires hardware most facilities decommissioned years ago, and Honeywell’s own documentation still references addresses like @vtext.com that no longer exist.

The email path still works fine, though. And that’s all you need to get text alerts on your phone. This article covers how to route your EBI alarm emails through text.email so they arrive as SMS messages instead of sitting unread in an inbox.

If your email notifications are already configured, setup takes about a minute.

Note: If your Honeywell BAS runs on the Niagara Framework (WEBs-N4, ComfortPoint Open, JACE) rather than EBI, we have a separate guide for Niagara text alerts that covers that configuration path.

Honeywell EBI Text Alerts: Table of Contents

Setting Up Text Alerts on Your Honeywell EBI System

EBI sends alarm notifications through email. Instead of sending those emails to a regular inbox, you send them to an address that converts the email into an SMS on your phone.

Step 1: Sign up with text.email

text.email is an email-to-text tool. You send it an email, it shows up as a text on your phone.

It is, by far, the easiest way to turn alerts into text messages. (Because, as you’ve probably learned, you can’t just plug your phone number into your Honeywell EBI system.)

With text.email you’ll 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 within seconds.

We’ll plug this into your Honeywell EBI notification routing in Step 3.

Step 2: Confirm your EBI email notifications are working

If you’re already receiving alarm emails from EBI, skip to Step 3.

EBI sends email through the Alarm Pager module, which is part of the Building Manager component. This needs SMTP configured on the EBI server (settings that are typically managed by whoever commissioned the installation).

To verify or change them, open EBI System Management Studio on the server and navigate to the SMTP/email configuration within the Alarm Pager settings. Confirm the SMTP Server, Port, and Authentication details are correct for your mail server.

If you’re using Gmail as your relay, you’ll need a Gmail App Password — the 16-character code you generate at Google Account → App Passwords. Google killed basic password authentication for SMTP in 2024, so your regular Gmail password won’t work here. Use smtp.gmail.com, port 587, with TLS enabled.

Send a test email to your regular inbox before doing anything else. If that doesn’t arrive, fix your SMTP configuration first.

Step 3: Add your text.email address as an alarm notification recipient

EBI’s Alarm Pager lets you route alarms to specific email recipeints based on priority and point type.

In EBI System Management Studio, open the Alarm Pager configuration and add a new notification recipient (or modify an existing one). In the Email Address field, enter your text.email address: yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email.

Then configure the alarm routing rules to control which alarms trigger a notification to this recipient. You can filter by alarm priority (Urgent, High, Low, Journal), by point type, or by area/category. Route only your critical and urgent alarms to the SMS recipient — I’ll cover what’s worth texting vs. what’s fine as email later in this article.

Step 4: Test it

Trigger a test alarm or use the Alarm Pager’s built-in test function to send a notification to the text.email recipient. You should get a text within seconds.

If SMTP test emails aren’t working, the most common culprit on EBI servers is network isolation — BAS VLANs that block outbound SMTP traffic. Your network admin may need to allow outbound connections on port 587 (or 25) from the EBI server. The Alarm Pager log will show you whether the email is being sent and rejected, or never leaving the server at all.

Why EBI’s Alarm Pager SMS Stopped Working

If you had SMS alerts working on your Honeywell EBI system and they’ve gone quiet, the problem isn’t your configuration. It’s the infrastructure those alerts depended on.

The cell phone carrier gateways that Alarm Pager relied on are dead

For years, building engineers set up Alarm Pager email recipients using carrier email-to-SMS gateway addresses (for instance, yournumber@vtext.com for Verizon or yournumber@txt.att.net for AT&T. Honeywell’s own documentation listed these carrier domains as the way to get SMS from EBI.

Welp, those gateways are gone. Verizon shut down vtext.com. AT&T killed txt.att.net. T-Mobile killed tmomail.net. The carriers pulled the plug because of rampant spam abuse and new compliance requirements (and, well, probably because the gateways weren’t generating enough revenue to be worth the regulatory burden).

If your Alarm Pager is still pointed at one of these addresses, it’s sending emails into a void. And Honeywell’s documentation hasn’t caught up yet.

EBI’s GSM modem path is obsolete hardware

The Alarm Pager also supported a direct GSM modem connection; in other words, a physical modem attached to the EBI server that sent SMS over TAP or PET protocol. Some installations used this to bypass email entirely.

The problem is obvious: it requires maintaining a GSM modem with a SIM card and active cellular service plugged into your BAS server. The paging service providers this was designed to communicate with are largely extinct. It’s infrastructure from an era when building engineers carried Motorola pagers on their belts.

DIY email-to-SMS means A2P 10DLC registration

So what about the obvious vibe coding workaround: build your own email-to-SMS pipeline with Twilio or a similar API?

Well, besides the fact that means another fragile system to maintain, it also runs into A2P 10DLC registration. Sending application-to-person SMS in the U.S. now requires registering your business and message campaign with The Campaign Registry, even for a single-use case.

Honeywell EBI Text Alerts: Pricing and Getting Started

text.email exists because the carrier gateways died and nothing replaced them for people who just need their system’s email alerts to show up as texts. It handles A2P 10DLC compliance so you don’t have to deal with carrier registration or campaign approval, and comes with 200 messages per month.

For a building running critical-alarm-only SMS routing, 200 messages is more than most months will need. What matters isn’t the volume — it’s the reliability of getting the one text that tells you the chiller plant just faulted before you find out from a tenant complaint the next morning.

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

Which Honeywell EBI Alarms Are Worth a Text Message

Not every EBI alarm should buzz someone’s phone. Keep SMS reserved for conditions where delayed response has real consequences. Everything else stays on email.

Always text

  • Chiller fault or compressor lockout
  • Boiler high-limit or flame failure
  • Building static pressure loss
  • Fire alarm system communication failure
  • Generator fail-to-start or ATS transfer failure
  • Freezestat trip

Consider texting

  • Cooling tower fan failure or high condenser water temperature
  • Multiple VAV box communication failures on the same air handler
  • Economizer damper stuck or actuator failure
  • Elevator machine room high temperature

Leave on email

  • Scheduled maintenance reminders
  • Setpoint adjustment confirmations
  • Trend log rollovers
  • Non-critical sensor drift warnings
  • Normal-priority BACnet device status updates

EBI’s Alarm Pager filtering by priority level (Urgent, High, Low, Journal) maps well to this. Route Urgent and High to the text.email recipient. Leave Low and Journal on standard email.

Honeywell EBI Text Alerts: Next Steps

Sign up at text.email, add your text.email address to the Honeywell EBI Alarm Pager recipient list, filter your alarms to the conditions worth waking up for, and start getting texts immediately.

Try text.email free

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