Turn off email-to-text feature

That is not something you can turn off yourself. You can call and request your line to be blocked from getting texts by email. That will block all texts from emails, including any legitimate ones. Another option is to forward them to 7726. You will get a reply asking for the originating number or email address. When you reply with that 9 digit number, ATT should be able to determine and block the originating email address.

Sandblaster, thank you very much for your recommendations. Unfortunately, I have tried both in the past.

The ATT representative said that she was unaware of a way to do this, put me on hold for a long while, then returned to say that it was not possible but she would report my request. I'll try again today and hopefully get an informed representative.

Forwarding the spam texts to 7726 and then following up with the 9 digit number, has been done about 58 times now. Nothing has changed. The formats and styles of each of the reported messages were consistent, with only the sender name, the message itself, and the "urgent" phone number to call changing each time.

The good news is that I learned how the messages originate. The sender uses software that spoofs the sender's origin, and sends an email to "[email scrubbed]." Sure enough, in a test of how it works, I was able to email from my desktop a text message to my own cell phone. On my cell phone, the result was a message from 1410200***.

There is no spoofing involved. That 1410xxx number is assigned by the email to text gateway. Good luck finding an agent that can block texts from emails. I know it’s possible, many customers have reported success. There is some internal customer support document that tells agents how to complete your request. If you search the forum, you may be able to find the document number you can refer them to. 

FINALLY! I was able today to get ATT to block text messages and multimedia messages sent to me as email. After a 10-minute wait for an online chat, I got agent #1. Unfortunately, after a 12-minute text exchange, agent #1 still had no idea what I was talking about. Fortunately, agent #1 was good enough to escalate my request to agent #2 at the "Advanced Technical Support Team." Agent #2 had it done in about 2 minutes.

I tested my cell phone immediately by sending an email to [email scrubbed]. After about a minute, I received an email with the message,

So it worked.