Text messaging

Ringfully sends and receives SMS on your own numbers. Messages arrive in a shared inbox for the organization rather than a personal one, threaded by the other party’s number, so a conversation survives the agent who started it being away. A call flow can also send a message: a confirmation, a link, a callback notice.

You are the sender. Whether you were entitled to send a particular message is your responsibility, and the two regimes that will decide it are:

Canada: anti-spam legislation

A commercial electronic message needs consent, express or implied. It must identify you, give a way to reach you, and carry an unsubscribe mechanism that works for at least sixty days. Penalties run to millions of dollars, and directors can be personally liable.

United States: telephone consumer protection rules

Marketing texts need prior express written consent. A withdrawal of consent has to be honoured across every channel, and the outside limit for acting on one is ten business days. Statutory damages are per message, which is what makes a list problem expensive rather than embarrassing.

Transactional messages to someone you are already dealing with sit differently from marketing to a list. If you are not sure which one you are sending, you are probably sending the second.

Ringfully reads inbound messages for opt-out keywords and acts on them. A reply of STOP, ARRÊT, UNSUBSCRIBE or DÉSABONNER puts that number on your organization’s suppression list, and Ringfully then refuses to send to it.

What is recognised, ignoring case, accents and punctuation, so that ARRET and ARRÊT are the same word and a trailing period changes nothing:

Opt-out

STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, ARRÊT, ARRÊTE, ARRETT, ARRÊTER, DÉSABONNER, DÉSABONNE, DÉSABONNEMENT. Any of these sent on its own is an opt-out. Most of them also count inside a message of three words or fewer, so “STOP PLEASE” and “ARRÊT SVP” are honoured. CANCEL, END and DÉSABONNEMENT count only as the entire message; the first two because they are ordinary words in a reply about an appointment or an order.

Opt back in

START, UNSTOP, YES, DÉBUT, and only as the entire message. A sentence that happens to contain one of them does not resubscribe anyone.

When an opt-out is recognised:

1. the number goes on a suppression list held for your organization, with the date and the exact word the person sent;
2. any contact record holding that number is marked as having revoked consent;
3. a later attempt to text that number is refused with an error instead of being sent, whether it comes from the shared inbox, from a call flow or through the API; and
4. where the carrier has not already answered the sender itself, Ringfully sends one bilingual confirmation. In practice that is the French keywords, because carriers answer the standard English ones.

An opt-in releases the suppression. The row is kept with a release date rather than deleted, because the sequence is the record. It does not set consent to granted: someone texting START is asking to be reachable again, which is not the express consent a commercial message needs.

A contact record carries a consent status of unknown, granted or revoked, alongside how consent was obtained, when, and a note. Contacts start at unknown. Under Settings, then Messaging consent, you can see the suppression list, the word each person sent and the date. Lifting an entry there requires a permission and is written to the audit log with the name of the person who did it.

What is still yours.

• Only the words above are recognised. A longer reply that asks you to stop in its own words, such as “please take me off your list”, arrives as an ordinary message and nothing else happens. You still have to read your replies.
• The suppression list governs text messages. It does not stop a call.
• Nothing requires a consent record before a message goes out. A consent status of unknown does not block a send; only the suppression list does.
• Ringfully does not add unsubscribe wording to your messages. Canadian anti-spam law requires that mechanism in the message itself, and the text is yours.
• A suppression covers your organization on Ringfully. It is not a national do-not-call registry, and it does not reach any other channel or tool you use.

Your mobile carrier applies its own keyword handling as well, on its own terms and for its own numbers. We do not rely on it. Where a carrier refuses one of your messages because the recipient opted out at that level, we add the number to your list at that point.

What this means for you. The keyword path is automatic and the block on sending is enforced. Everything around it stays yours: obtaining consent, recording it, keeping an unsubscribe mechanism in the message, and acting on a request to stop that does not use one of the words above. Transactional replies to a customer who contacted you first are a different matter.

North American carriers filter application-to-person messaging that is not registered under their brand-and-campaign scheme.

Ringfully is not registered for 10DLC, and has not implemented STIR/SHAKEN call attestation. Two consequences you will actually notice:

1. Messages may be delayed, filtered or dropped by a carrier with no error returned to us and nothing shown to you. The message will look sent.
2. Outbound calls may be displayed on the recipient’s handset as suspected spam, regardless of who is calling or why.

Neither is a fault in the software and neither is something we can fix from our side. Registration takes weeks and is planned. We do not warrant delivery of any message.

When an unrecognised number calls you or you call it, the system creates a contact record so the next call shows a name instead of digits. That is a record of your own communications. It is not evidence that the person consented to hear from you, and treating the contact list as a list to message is a decision you are making, and answering for.

Nothing unlawful; nothing to a number that has asked you to stop; no bulk unsolicited messaging; nothing designed to disguise who it is from; and nothing in the categories carriers block outright, which in North America generally covers high-interest lending, cannabis, firearms and gambling regardless of local legality.

The acceptable use policy covers the rest and applies to messaging as much as to calling. Breach it and we may suspend messaging on the account without notice, because a carrier can otherwise block traffic for every customer we have.

Write to [email protected].