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I am trying to develop a web based SMS application and one of the features I would like to have is threaded group conversations.

Imagine there are 5 people, A, B, C, D, and E. 'A' is the person using the web application and 'B','C','D','E' are on their mobile phones.

I want to create two threads such as this:

A -> (B, C, D)

A -> (B, C, E)

And track those conversations so that person A can see a threaded conversation of those separate group chats.

One way that I know that I can do this is by using multiple twilio numbers but is there a way to do it without using multiple numbers? Is there a way to embed a key or ID in the messages that are sent/received? Twilio has cookie support but that seems to be limited to two person conversations and only works for conversations that are initiated outside the app.

I looked into Plivo and Nexmo but I don't think it's possible with them either.

Is this just a limitation of SMS or is it possible to do what I am trying to do?

Chase
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1 Answers1

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SMS is stateless, and there's no way to tie two messages to each other (as a thread) other than match meta data (the pairing of a to / from).

For what you're trying to do, you'll need multiple virtual numbers, as this is limitation of SMS itself.

Tim Lytle
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  • Tim, your answer is very interesting and you identify the metadata that your using or can be used to link two messages together? – EasyE Jan 28 '18 at 20:27