How to Get Growlink Text Alerts (Since Their Official Docs Are Wrong)

I’ve talked with a couple of Growlink users over the past month during my sweep of different “man, we really need text alerts” businesses. And they told me: Man, we really need text alerts.

They have Growlink handling different things (from irrigation and fertigation to climate and EC/pH tracking). But what they don’t have are text alerts when anything goes seriously wrong.

And they want text alerts, because those cut through the noise better than email or push notifications ever could.

Unfortunately, Growlink’s official recommendation is to use the email-to-text address from your cell phone carrier (like your-number@vtext.com) — and those are all either dead or dying.

So you need an alternative. And, hey, good news: It’s really easy to set one up.

In this article, I’ll show you how to get your Growlink sensor alerts and offline alerts as texts in a matter of minutes.

Growlink Text Alerts: Table of Contents

• How to Actually Get Growlink Text Alerts (Since Their Official Instructions Don’t Work)

How to Actually Get Growlink Text Alerts (Since Their Official Instructions Don’t Work)

As I mentioned in the intro, Growlink’s official advice on how to get text alerts doesn’t actually work anymore. (I’ll cover it more later about why the cell phone carrier gateways all died.)

But the method they describe will work, and that’s using email to text.

Here’s how to set that up so it works in 2026 and beyond.

Step 1: Get an email-to-text address

Growlink’s official method for getting text alerts is by using an email-to-text system. And that method still works, just not how they describe it — because the cell carriers’ email-to-text features are dead.

So we’ll use a drop-in replacement for that method. And the service that works just like the carriers’ old email to SMS system is text.email. (Plus it has a few other useful features for you that your cell phone provider didn’t.)

Basically: You sign up, you get a special email to SMS address, and now you’re ready to send texts.

(And, if you need, it can also text other people on your team — and even do it on individual schedules.)

Step 2: Add your email-to-text address to your sensor alerts

Alright, now in Growlink’s Portal 2.0, open the controller and click Rules.

Pick your rule folder and rule group, then scroll down to Alerts. Open an alert you already have, or click Add Alert.

In the Emails field, add your text.email address.

You can also put a regular email address in too if you also want to get email alerts (that’s what Growlink recommends).

Click Save Changes.

You will, I’m sorry to say, need to repeat this process individually for each alert where you want texts.

Step 3: Add the address to your offline alerts

If a controller goes offline, its sensor alerts can’t go out either. That’s why you want the offline alert as a text too.

Growlink sends an offline alert when a controller goes more than 20 minutes without connecting to Growlink’s cloud. (Usually that’s because of a network or power outage.)

In Portal 2.0, click Settings, pick the controller, and click its Profile button (the cogwheel).

Add your text.email address to Status Notification Emails and click Save Changes.

But… modules (like an ESM under a PIC) have their own offline alerts which you turn on separately.

Click the three dots next to the module and click Edit. Turn on Enable Offline Alerts for this module, then click Update Controller.

You don’t have to add your address again, though, since they go to the same email(s) as your controller alerts.

But that’s it — you’re all set up now and, ideally, this took you less than five minutes.

Aren’t There Other Ways to Get Growlink Alerts?

For most grows, the email-to-text setup above is by far the easiest way to get urgent alerts. It uses fields Growlink already has, it covers both sensor and offline alerts, and doesn’t depend on your cell carrier.

But yes, there are some other options…

The cell carrier email-to-text method (the one Growlink uses)

This is what Growlink’s help articles, AI chatbot, and tutorial videos use for SMS alerts.

They say you should type your number plus your carrier’s email-to-text domain (like 5551234567@vtext.com) into the alert’s Emails field. Then your carrier turns the email into a text.

And that was great advice in 2013. But today?

• AT&T shut off their txt.att.net email-to-text service on June 17, 2025.
• Verizon says it’ll finish shutting down vtext.com by March 31, 2027, and right now it’s a coin flip whether messages will get through.
• T-Mobile: tmomail.net is also shut down, and also stopped working in 2025.

And your emails to those addresses fail silently, so you won’t know that an alert was supposed to come to you but didn’t.

So this is NOT a viable option anymore.

Growlink push notifications

Every sensor alert has a Send Push Notifications toggle.

But you’re here because you know what we all know about push notifications: They’re just as easy to miss as emails. They stack up, or they get buried, or they deliver silently.

They just aren’t as urgent and unmissable as texts. I’d consider them a companion and not a true alternative.

Building your own with webhooks and an SMS provider

So of course the modern instinct is: Can’t I just build this myself?

Growlink’s integrations page mentions webhooks, but I can’t figure out how to use them (and their AI chatbot said it couldn’t help me).

But let’s imagine for a moment they did exist. Or you could set up your own email-to-text service using a provider like Twilio.

But there are three major problems.

1. That’s a new system you have to build and maintain. And if it goes down, how are you getting that alert?
2. You’ll have to wrestle with some regulatory costs and paperwork around something called A2P 10DLC, otherwise your messages won’t get delivered.
3. If you’re growing certain products (like, you know, anything cannabis related), Twilio likely won’t take you at all. Even though what you’re doing is legal.

So yeah, you could build your own system, but there are more landmines hiding in it than you realize.

Get Growlink SMS Alerts Live in the Next Five Minutes

You’ve seen the process now of how to get text alerts from Growlink when something major goes wrong with your system.

And it really is just three steps:

1. Sign up at text.email to get your email to SMS address.
2. In Growlink, add it to the Emails field on key sensor alerts.
3. Turn on offline alerts for your modules.

I can make it even easier: We can skip step one while you test it out. Just put your-number@text.email (with your actual cell number, like 5552342312@text.email) in a Growlink alert’s Emails field. Then send a test and watch it come to your phone.

You don’t have to sign up for an account beforehand.

And after you see how well it works, it’s easy to grab a text.email account so you can set up ALL your critical Growlink alerts to come right to you as text messages.

How to Decide Which Grow Room Alerts Deserve a Text

Throughout this article, I’ve been saying things like “urgent alerts” or “critical alerts” — and there’s a reason.

The point of using text alerts is that texts cut through all the noise. But if you use text alerts for everything, they become noise.

So save texts for the situations where missing an alert could cause real damage, and leave the rest on email.

Here’s a possible split to get you going (though, of course, you know what’s urgent to you far better than I do):

Worth a text:

• Controller offline. 
• Module offline, for modules that run irrigation, fertigation or an important sensor.
• Room temperature above your high limit.
• Root-zone moisture below your low limit.
• EC or pH out of range at the root zone.
• Leak detection.

Fine on email:

• Readings that are a little off target that you’d fix on your next walkthrough anyway.
• Alerts for empty rooms, or rooms between cycles.

There are two Growlink settings that can also help cut down on false alarms:

• Minimum Duration keeps a door opening for 30 seconds from setting off a text.
• Time of Day lets you set different thresholds for lights-on and lights-off.

Time to Get Started with Growlink Text Alerts

Growlink’s official documentation says if you want text alerts, you should use the cell phone carriers’ email to text addresses. Unfortunately those are all dead (or on their deathbed).

So the easiest alternative is to use a system that works just like the carriers used to (but that has some extra useful features — and isn’t going to silently disappear on you).

You’re less than five minutes away from Growlink SMS alerts: Sign up at text.email and add your address to your sensor alerts and your controllers’ Status Notification Emails.

That way, your next critical Growlink alert will come to you as a text — so you don’t miss it.