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SMS Carrier Violations
Updated over a month ago

If you notice some of your messages are being marked as "Undelivered," there is a possibility you may have received a carrier violation. As a general rule of thumb, we strongly recommend that you have at minimum 1 number per Location, plus one number per 30,000 message segments sent per month.

What Causes a Violation?

There are active efforts from phone carriers to seek out spam, which may flag your messages and/or cause delivery issues. Carriers do not advertise how their spam filters work to avoid reverse engineering. Every carrier has its own stipulations, and there are a number of other factors that could contribute to receiving a carrier violation. Nevertheless, the following general flags apply:

  • Your applicants complained to their carrier that they were receiving unwanted messages.

  • Carriers are filtering your messages because the volume of messages you are sending from each standard number is too large.

  • You are sending similar or identical content from a long code to multiple phone numbers within a short period of time.

  • You have multiple Openings in each Location that are sending messages in quick succession from the same number to a high number of recipients.

Scenarios at risk of a carrier violation

If you have 15 Openings in one location and they're all using the same phone number to send messages there is a chance that your number could be flagged as spam by the carriers resulting in undelivered messages. Conversely, if you have one Opening in a Location, but you send out 400 messages to 200 unique recipients in a day in that location, you also run into the risk of the carrier flagging your messages as spam.

The general rule of thumb is no more than 200 unique recipients per day from a long code at a rate of no more than 15-60 messages per minute to avoid possible carrier end filtering.

Short Codes

For higher volumes of messaging Fountain offers short codes phone numbers. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you are interested in purchasing a short code for your messaging usage.

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