Tag: MMS

Forbidden Message Categories for SMS

Post author By Rita
Post date May 4, 2023

Forbidden Message Categories for SMS: Certain types of message content may be subject to restrictions even when your use case is not forbidden.

Forbidden Message Categories for SMS and MMS

The following messaging use cases are not allowed on SMS or MMS in the US or Canada. And we have also provided some suggested alternatives for conducting certain forbidden use cases.

Category	Examples	Notes
High-risk financial services	Payday loans Short term high-interest loans Third-party loans (e.g., auto, mortgage) Student loans Cryptocurrency	“Third-party” means originating from any party other than the one which will service the loan.
Third-party lead generation services	Companies that buy, sell, or share consumer information.
Debt collection or forgiveness	Third-party debt collection Debt consolidation Debt reduction Credit repair programs	“Third-party” means originating from any party other than the one who is owed the debt. For example, a hospital could send messages regarding bills for its own patients, assuming they provided opt-in to receive that messaging. Third-party debt collectors may send transactional messages that consumers have directly opted in to; however, they cannot use SMS as a channel to collect a debt.
“Get rich quick” schemes	Deceptive work-from-home programs Risk investment opportunities Pyramid schemes	This is different from outreach about employment as a result of compliant opt-in practices, messages from brokerages to their members, investment news alerts, or other investment-related messages.
Illegal substances/articles	Cannabis (United States) CBD (United States) Fireworks	Cannabis is federally illegal in the United States. Cannabis businesses will not be permitted to use SMS/MMS messaging in the US, regardless of message content. CBD is federally legal, but is subject to varying legal restrictions across US states, so US carriers do not permit messaging related to CBD. Fireworks are a regulated product and US and CA carriers do not permit messaging related to fireworks.
Prescription drugs	Drugs that require a prescription	Offers for drugs that cannot be sold over-the-counter in the US/Canada are forbidden.
Gambling	Casino apps Gambling websites	Gambling traffic is prohibited in the US and Canada on all number types (Toll Free, Short Code, Long Code).
“S.H.A.F.T.” use cases	Sex Hate Alcohol Firearms Tobacco	While tobacco and alcohol traffic is prohibited on Toll Free, it is allowed on Short Code, or Long Code, as long as proper age gating procedures are in place. Firearms and vaping-related traffic is prohibited.

What to do if your use case is listed as forbidden

If your use case is listed above as forbidden for SMS and MMS messaging, you may be able to reach out to your leads by Email. It’s also an option for many of the above use cases.

For example, cannabis- or CBD-related messaging may be conducted via email, as long as you have proper age gating in place and are sending toward recipients in a locale where the substance is legal.

In addition, calling is not subject to the same carrier restrictions as SMS.

Sending forbidden SMS content through aNinja

If you send SMS or MMS messages with forbidden content through aNinja, our upstream telephony carrier automatically filters your SMS content and suspends your account.

Which means that your texts will not go through. And subsequently, you receive an error code 30002 on outgoing SMS attempts: account suspended.

Sending Cannabis or CBD-related messaging

Messaging Policy forbids sending messages about anything that is illegal in the jurisdiction where the message recipient lives. This policy affects messaging related to cannabis (marijuana) and cannabidiol (CBD) in the United States, as well as many other countries.

SMS and MMS

The United States

SMS or MMS messages related to cannabis are not allowed in the United States. As federal laws prohibit its sale, even though some states have legalized it. Similarly, messages related to CBD products are not permissible in the United States, as certain states prohibit its sale. The Messaging Policy is reflective of the US carrier rules in this area, and there are no exceptions to this policy.

Our upstream telephony provider defines a cannabis-related message as any message which relates to the marketing or sale of a cannabis product, regardless of whether or not those messages explicitly contain cannabis terms, images, or links to cannabis websites.

Canada

Cannabis is not an illicit substance in Canada, nor is CBD. Messaging that deals with age-restricted content (such as cannabis, but also including alcohol, gambling, etc.) is generally allowed in Canada, but may be subject to scrutiny by Canada telecom authorities. If you intend to send cannabis-related traffic in Canada, it is crucial that you have proper age gating in place for your messages, to avoid compliance risks. Please note: Cannabis and CBD-related traffic is prohibited on Toll-Free Numbers.

Other countries

Cannabis and/or CBD products are illegal in many countries around the world. Per our upstream telephony provider’s Messaging Policy, sending messages about cannabis in these countries is a violation of their policy. In countries where cannabis is fully legal, message traffic is permissible unless forbidden by local carrier rules. If the our upstream telephony provider is aware of relevant restrictions, these will be published on the SMS Guidelines page for the country in question. If you are unsure whether your use case is legal or compliant in a given country, we recommend you seek qualified legal counsel.

WhatsApp

Cannabis-related messaging is not allowed over WhatsApp, as WhatsApp’s rules prohibit drug-related use cases.

What to do to unblock the account

You want to email support@aninja.com and we’ll communicate with the carrier to see if it is recoverable.

And definitely, you want to change your text templates to align with the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and TOS (Terms of Service). Refrain completely from any reference to terms like gummies, puff, vape, delta, and any other terms that could be scanned by the telephony carrier.

Please check this link for recommendations to increase the deliverability of your text messages

Error codes returned by the carrier on SMS or MMS

Post author By Rita
Post date November 21, 2022

You might receive error codes returned by the telephone carrier after you’ve sent a SMS or MMS.

The telephone carriers filter all the messages to protect the mobile subscribers from spam and other forms of unwanted messaging.

And, these systems look at both message content and volume.

Filtering in the United States and Canada can affect the delivery of your SMS and MMS messages.

Where do error codes appear in aNinja

When in the lead view, in the history section, you can see “error” in red on the right corner under the sent SMS or MMS.

Hover your mouse over “error” to see the error code.

Then, search for this code in the below section to understand the reason for this error.

Error codes references on SMS or MMS

Below are most common error messages returned by the carriers.

11751 => Media exceeds messaging provider size limit.
- Maximum size limit depends on the messaging channel.
- aNinja supports an MMS of 600KB.
12300 => Invalid Content-Type.
- Our carrier is unable to process the Content-Type of the provided URL.
- You must return a Content-Type for all requests. Requests without a Content-Type will appear in the Debugger as a 502 Bad Gateway error.
30002 => Account suspended
- The message you sent was filtered by the Carrier for containing forbidden content which resulted in suspending your account/number.
30003 => Unavailable or unreachable destination.
- The destination handset you are trying to reach is switched off or otherwise unavailable.
30005 => Unknown or inactive destination number.
- The destination number you are trying to reach is unknown and may no longer exist.
- The device you are trying to reach is not on or does not have sufficient signal.
- The device cannot receive SMS (e.g. the phone number belongs to a landline).
- There is an issue with the mobile carrier.
30006 => Landline or unreachable destination.
- The destination number is unable to receive this message. Potential reasons could include trying to reach a landline. Or, in the case of short codes, an unreachable carrier.
30007 => Your message was blocked by the carrier due to spam, phishing, and fraud content.
30008 => Delivery of your message failed for unknown reasons.
- Our carrier receives a very generic error from the destination carriers that they have no further details about. They associates the message with the error code 30008 letting you know that they truly don’t know what caused this error from the provider.
30019 => Content size exceeds carrier limit.
- Message failed because the size of the content associated with the message exceeded the carrier limit.
30410 => Provider timeout.
- The provider used may be experiencing disruptions resulting in errors or request timeouts. Messages are failed and not retried to avoid duplicate message delivery.
32017 => Carrier blocked call due to poor reputation score on the telephone number.
- The calling number has a low answer rate from end users; or, generates low-duration calls; or it is responsible for large volumes of unwanted calls.

Adding Attachments to Templates

Post author By support
Post date December 1, 2021

Adding attachments to templates sounds interesting especially if you’re trying to launch a special campaign with a nice catchy design.

Attachments to email templates

We presently don’t allow attachments to email templates.

We recommend hosting your attachment files on your website or a file hosting service and adding the link to download it in your template call to action.

This has the following advantages:

If need be, you can update the file at the link source.
- This is useful if the attachments need urgent changes after the emails have been sent out.
It increases the reachability of your emails:
- As it lowers the email spam score.
- And you’ll be sending smaller-sized outbound emails.

Attachments to text templates

Adding an attachment to your text template will change the SMS text into an MMS.

Go to Automations > Text Templates

Click on +Add text template and Choose a file

We highly recommend hosting your attachment files on your website or a file hosting service and adding the link to download it in your template call to action.

Also, you want to consider counting the characters included in the text to avoid your text being counted as multiple segments and being overcharged for them.

If the size of the text is larger than 3 segments, or if it requires a specific encoding method, an alert will pop-up to notify you.

Sending a text (SMS) via aNinja

Post author By support
Post date August 4, 2020

Sending a text (SMS) via aNinja is a way to communicate with your leads and nurture them with your campaigns.

What’s an SMS

SMS (Short Message Service) is a text message that can contain up to 160 alphanumeric characters for every segment.

From a business’s perspective, there are hundreds of potential use cases for text message marketing including sales reminders, discounts and special offers, emergency alerts, and more.

The most effective business text messages are timely, informative, compelling, and easy to understand.

While SMS was built to send short messages, MMS focuses on sending multimedia messages.

Sending a text (SMS) via aNinja

When on the lead view, click on Text from the toolbar
Your phone number is automatically injected next to “From”.
- If you’re an Admin user, from the dropdown, you can choose the phone number you want to send the text through.
The primary phone number is also automatically injected next to “To”.
You can either select an available template
- The content of the template will be injected into the body section.
Or you can manually type the message in the body section.
Before you send your text, you want to make sure that it does not exceeds 160 characters, to avoid being billed for more messages.
Check the counters under the SMS body. When you go over 160 characters, the characters counter turns red, and the segment counter increases by 1.
Click Send to send your text immediately,
Or click on the arrow next to send to schedule your text to send at a later date and time.

Text Segmentation / Message Length

Maximum Message Length with aNinja Messaging
The aNinja Programmable Messaging platform has a limit of 160 characters in a single incoming or outgoing message request.
Additional Considerations for Long SMS Messages
Although aNinja supports large message payloads for all Messaging channels including SMS; it is important to understand that some wireless carriers and devices may behave differently than others when receiving long SMS messages. In addition, the length of an SMS, and which characters are present will affect its price, because of a concept called segmentation.
- What’s a text segment or Segmentation? SMS industries count messages before sending them through your carrier. They count the number of characters that a text contains. Each segment is of 160 characters. If your text contains more characters, you’d end up with two messages on your bill.
Message encoding
Carriers encode SMS in different formats to represent the characters and special characters used in the message.The default encoding used in SMS is GSM-7, which consumes fewer segments, making it more cost-effective.However, if the text content includes special characters like emojis or backticks, a different encoding called UCS-2 is used; which consumes more segments, approximately double the amount of GSM-7.

When it comes to MMS, the encoding used can vary depending on the content of the text. It can be either GSM-7 or UCS-2, depending on whether special characters are included in the message or not.
In conclusion, there are multiple things you can consider before sending text messages to ensure effective deliverability with the right cost.

Need help in sending a text (SMS) via aNinja? Leave us an email at support@aninja.com. And, we will happily assist you!

MMS messages

Post author By support
Post date June 17, 2020

MMS stands for ‘multimedia messaging service’. It was built using the same technology as SMS (short message service) text messages.

While SMS was built to send short messages, MMS focuses on sending multimedia messages.

Some of the rich content types which can be sent include phone contacts, audio and video files, and images.

Types of MMS messages

Audio files
Video files
Images

Sending MMS through aNinja

Search for your lead
When on a lead View, click on Text in the toolbar
Your phone number is automatically injected next to “From”.
- If you’re an Admin user, from the dropdown, you can choose the phone number you want to send the text through.

The primary phone number is also automatically injected next to “To”.
You can either select an available template
- Then, the content of the template is injected into the body section. And the media file saved in the template is attached to it.
Or, you can manually type the message in the body section.
Click on the attachment icon and select a file
- Supported file formats (jpeg, png, and gif)
- Check the “Supported media types” below.
Before you send your text, you want to make sure that the total message size is under the maximum size limit for the channel.
- Check the “Attachment Limits” section below.
Click Send to send your text immediately,
Or, click on the arrow next to send to schedule to a later date and time.
An MMS can also be sent in bulk text sequences. Attach the media file to the template and use it in the sequences.

Note!

Make sure to include content in your template before saving it, not only attachment(s). Otherwise, when attaching it to a text sequence, it will not be launched.

Supported Media Types

Different carriers support different types of media, regardless of the media types allowed in aNinja.

When you send an MMS, the telephone carrier checks the content-type header at the provided MediaURL to validate the content type of the media file. If the content type header does not match that of the media file, the request will be rejected.

You can check the status of the MMS in the lead view, on the bottom right of the message. Hover your mouse over the error to see the message provided by the carrier. Some carriers don’t provide error messages.

The following types of content are fully supported. This content will be formatted for delivery on destination devices.

image/jpeg

image/jpg

image/gif

image/png

The following types of content are accepted. Requests will not be rejected, but the content will not be modified for device compatibility.

Audio

audio/basic

audio/L24

audio/mp4

audio/mpeg

audio/ogg

audio/vnd.rn-realaudio

audio/vnd.wave

audio/3gpp

audio/3gpp2

audio/ac3

audio/webm

audio/amr-nb

audio/amr

Video

video/mpeg

video/mp4

video/quicktime

video/webm

video/3gpp

video/3gpp2

video/3gpp-tt

video/H261

video/H263

video/H263-1998

video/H263-2000

video/H264

Image

image/bmp

image/tiff

Text

text/vcard

text/x-vcard

text/csv

text/rtf

text/richtext

text/calendar

text/directory

Application

application/pdf

application/vcard

application/vnd.apple.pkpass

Most of the phone carriers support image file attachments in one of the supported file formats (jpeg, png, and gif) and they might not support these types (PDF, BMP, MPEG, MP4, Quicktime, and 3GPP).

Message encoding

Text messages, also known as SMS, are encoded by the carriers in different formats to represent the characters and special characters used in the message.

The default encoding used in SMS is GSM-7, which consumes fewer segments, making it more cost-effective.

However, if the text content includes special characters like emojis or backticks, a different encoding called UCS-2 is used; which consumes more segments, approximately double the amount of GSM-7.

When it comes to MMS, the encoding used can vary depending on the content of the text. It can be either GSM-7 or UCS-2, depending on whether special characters are included in the message or not.

Attachment Limits

When sending text and pictures in the same message (MMS messaging), a message can contain up to 10 images and 1600 characters.

Through aNinja, you can send an MMS of 600KB. If your message (including body text and media) is larger than 600KB, your message request will fail to send.

In aNinja, we have reduced the size of the MMS to 600KB to increase the chances of deliverability. As the top US carriers have recently reduced their allows MMS sizes as follows:

Carrier Short code MMS attachment size
AT&T 600 KB <—- ideal size
Sprint 1400 KB
T-mobile 1000 KB
Verizon 1200 KB

So you want to provide a shorter video that is ideally < 600KB if you want to reach all the targeted audience.

Our carrier automatically compresses JPEG, PNG, or GIF files to reduce their size if they exceed certain thresholds, to help you fit more images on your message when needed.

Hence, there will not be any additional charges applied for the message body. It will be included in the MMS cost.

If your media is not an image file and is larger than the limit allowed by the destination carrier, your MMS message will fail.

You can always compress the size of your media file using tools online.

Lastly, we recommend hosting your media file on your website or a file hosting service and adding the link to download it in your template or text call to action.