SMS & messaging
Send and receive text messages from your numbers.
What you need
A number with SMS capability. Not all numbers have it — check capabilities before buying. See Buy a number.
Carrier registration, for US recipients. Required before you can reliably text US numbers. See US carrier registration (10DLC).
Sending a message
From the Inbox, open a conversation and reply, or start a new message to a contact. Messages are threaded with everything else from that person — calls, WhatsApp, email — on one timeline.
Receiving
Inbound messages arrive in the Inbox. They can be answered by a person, or by your AI receptionist if you have enabled the text channel. See Text messages.
Templates and signatures
Set message templates and signatures under Settings → Inbox and Settings → Messaging, for the replies you send repeatedly.
Auto-replies
Simple trigger-based automatic replies are configured under Settings → Messaging — for example, an acknowledgement to a message received out of hours.
These are fixed text, not the AI. If both are enabled, make sure they are not both responding to the same message.
Campaigns
To message many contacts at once, use Campaigns rather than the Inbox. See Campaigns.
Deliverability
Texting is heavily filtered by carriers. What gets messages delivered:
Register properly. Unregistered US traffic is blocked. This is not optional.
Identify yourself. Say who you are in the first message; a message from an unknown number with no sender name looks like a scam.
Include opt-out instructions on bulk messages.
Avoid link shorteners. Public shorteners are strongly associated with spam. Use your own domain.
Send at reasonable hours in the recipient's time zone. Many jurisdictions restrict the hours for commercial messages.
Carriers filter silently. A message can be accepted by the API, reported as sent, and never delivered. If delivery rates look wrong, check your registration status first.
Opt-outs
Replies of STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL and similar suppress the contact automatically, and no further messages are sent to them.
This is a legal requirement in most markets. Do not attempt to work around it — the penalties are significant and the suppression protects your numbers' reputation.
MMS
Some numbers support picture messaging. Check capabilities before relying on it, and note MMS is not universally supported outside North America.
Costs
Messages are charged per segment. A long message is split into several segments and billed accordingly, and using emoji or other non-GSM characters reduces the characters per segment considerably — a single emoji can nearly halve it.
See Usage & credits.