Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

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Twilio is sort of a dream for spammers, they'll just make new accounts on it and spam campaigns on those new accounts. Political organizations do it all the time, if you get on a list you're never getting off. Lookup the numbers sending to you (Twilio's own lookup tool works great for this) and it almost always comes back Twilio/Zipwhip.

I only recommend responding STOP to short codes since there's more investment and vetting on getting a short code. Carriers will intercept the request for TFN/local numbers sometimes but I don't really trust it. These numbers are all going to be spammers buying pools of numbers to churn and burn. They'll just import their list into a new account if it unsubs.

Oh and btw, it's actually easier now as a spammer to tell when numbers get burned. A few years back when the CTIA handover on regs happened (and sending costs went up) the carriers finally started to respond with the delivery status of the sent messages. Before this they didn't respond and you only knew your provider delivered the messages to the carrier, not whether the carrier delivered them to the handset.

I think Twilio requires its customers to go through the process of registering with the CTIA before allowing use of the SMS API. I abandoned a project because the process was too burdensome. Political campaigns are exempt though.

Is that new? I tried it out for fun once and it only took a few minutes and I don't recall any major hoops.

I think it's different if you're applying for a shortcode vs a regular or toll free number though. There are different regulations governing all of those.

There's only hoops to jump through if you want higher send rates from a number. The CTIA figured out a new cash grab was registering businesses as legit senders on TFA's but it doesn't promise delivery, just gets you a nice logo/name on SMS apps.

Having been on the purchasing end for wholesale marketing SMS I can tell you most of sales people will suggest the 'correct' way and happily sell things that let you do it the 'wrong' way.

Pretty sure that’s no longer the case. You need to register your “campaign” to send any SMS messages. I put campaign in quotes because the process seems to ignore the fact that people might have use cases that are unrelated to marketing.

https://help.twilio.com/articles/1260803965530

Earlier this year I think? I have a Twilio number that I setup just so my Home Assistant system could message me about things like water leaks. They stopped delivering any of those messages (while still charging me to send them!) and I have to register as a business and provide proof I have an opt-out, etc, etc.

The only phone number I ever texted was my real cell number, it's no longer worth having a Twilio number for a hobby project.

Yes - we went through this for a client I'm currently working with. We were migrating from an approved campaign via a different provider to doing it on Twilio and even in that case, there was quite a heavy process to get approved again on Twilio.

(Which, as an end-user, I'm happy about...)

Zipwhip is particuarly bad.

I report their spam to twilio, but twilio claima they cant do anything about spam from their sub

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