Comment by ChrisDutrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisDutrow | Hacker News Reader

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I did mitigate the problem last time. I communicated with them and they told me it was fine.

I'm very curious. Is this a communication mistake? Like do you think I'm some big company that forwards text messages to random people?

Do you understand these are text messages being sent to one of like 3 employees at my small company? We are not generating outbound content or allowing anyone else to do so. Your question about GDPR requests makes me think maybe you have misunderstood the context.

If you have correctly understood the context, do you actually think I should have some kind of AI algorithm scanning these messages for Phishing?

I'm not sure I understand what your are suggesting or how you would have solved this problem? You would have just turned off the text message forwarding I guess?

Is that how you solve problems? You see a problem, then you destroy the thing that caused the problem, so problem solved? What do you do for a living with that type of cognitive approach? Are you an entrepreneur? Do you really run a business with that attitude? Are you en engineer? If so, when you are asked to make something work, do you just tell your boss "no" if you run into a problem that requires a creative solution? Are you a lawyer? Is your job to tell people what thing they cannot do, but not to help people do new things? That would kind of make sense...

> Do you understand these are text messages being sent to one of like 3 employees at my small company? We are not generating outbound content or allowing anyone else to do so.

The bit that you are missing is that this sort of thing is between Twilio and Twilio's carrier partners (sometimes mediated by third-party aggregators), and has nothing to do with you or your particular use case. Carriers have very low tolerance for third parties like Twilio sending spam to their customers. If carriers get pissed off at Twilio, they'll stop delivering messages coming from Twilio (or will impose other restrictions, like low rate limits, or perhaps charge more, etc.). Good carrier relationships keep Twilio running; bad carrier relationships cause all sorts of problems for Twilio and Twilio's customers.

The carriers do not know or care that the spam/fraud message you tried to send to your employee was just you forwarding along a message that some other random person sent to the Twilio number. All they would care about is that a spam/fraud message came from Twilio's platform.

Having said that, I too am disappointed in the policy of auto-suspension, and in how long it took for you to get the problem resolved, and that phone support is expensive to come by.. I think the right approach is to catch these things at send time and just refuse to send them. Sure, if some very high percentage of traffic is all spam, maybe an auto-suspension might be warranted, but I assume (hope) that's not the case for your account.

(Disclosure: I work at Twilio, though not on the messaging platform. My words & opinion here are my own, and don't reflect Twilio's stance on anything. Throwaway for obvious reasons; Twilio doesn't allow the rank-and-file to speak publicly about this sort of thing.)

Yeah I think we're on the same page here. I mean its a complicated problem, they're under pressure to solve it. They were backed into a corner by the carriers and suspended my account. Shit happens.

They just need a phone number. I actually called sales hoping I could plead my case and get them to connect me with someone. But I couldn't get connected with sales. If this was due to omicron and sales would have helped me, then this is truly an edge case.

It's not even good business practice you are paying for something that is essentially free if implemented in every other way. This is not creative this abusing a system going against their ToS and blaming them for your own failure. I am suggesting you ingest the received messages and distribute it any other way like a lot of twilio customers probably do. This is merely a hack and a bad one at that.

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