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I've been using Twilio to send SMS and things work great. The only issue is that Twilio charges for both outbound and inbound messages. As such, we've been looking for other solutions.

We thought we found it with Plivo as their pricing was more favorable for SMS.

However, with Plivo, very quickly our outbound messages are being marked as spam or something and they're not being delivered.

We are sending the exact same message every day to about 5k users at a given time in the day. The message has a url in it, but it is something our users signed up for.

Two questions: 1. Why does everything work on Twilio and not on Plivo? 2. Is there a code change I can make to ensure our outbound messages sent with Plivo are not marked as spam by carriers and then stopped?

user402516
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You need to contact Plivo about this. I experience this problem too. Their carrier mark our number as spammer since we are sending almost the same messages (verification). They called their carrier and our number was white-listed.

Edang Jeorlie
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    Yeah, I contacted them. We are sending thousands of messages and so regardless of the carriers white-listing our number, after a few hundred messages, there is still an issue of undelivered SMS. Pretty ridiculous. Plivo markets themselves as an alternative to Twilio, but they definitely are not. – user402516 Jul 26 '16 at 14:35
  • They sure looks promising, I can't say they are reliable since I'm new with their service. They told me the day I reported that problem that their carriers are the one causing the undelivered sms due to blockers (spammer). I'm still on the phase of evaluating their service. – Edang Jeorlie Jul 28 '16 at 23:40
  • was the problem resolved? I may need to purchase numbers on the fly so calling them for each number to get whitelisted seems ridculous – jasan Feb 14 '17 at 20:32
  • hi @jasan yes the problem resolve in my case. I did open a ticket support and it went well. Make sure not to send same messages. Keep your message short like 120 char less.. – Edang Jeorlie Feb 14 '17 at 20:38
  • I did not think about the possibility that carriers could flag it as spam, since I have never had experience of SMS messages not getting delivered - after all they are always paid for. If I send the SMS "habbagurk" 50 times in a row I expect 50 SMS being delivered whatever teh reason or the carrier would need to change the invoice... on the other hand, I never really tried ... Its 2022 now, and carrier flagged sms ending in spam somewhere makes sense. It makes real sense because it's so random who gets the message - and the API even states the SMS is delivered! Now I know where to look! – Kim Steinhaug May 01 '22 at 16:08
  • YES! Thats the problem, I sent a new SMS with the PLIVO API having a unique text something typical as SMS - compared to a transactional message. And BEEP! SMS recieved... That explains the delivered confirmation and all, god damn carriers silently deleting without any notifications in any way... Whitelisting is the answer for sure! Luckily it seems that the SPAM filter applied somewhere in the carrier chain is text based. At the moment I will have to "tweak" the notifications so that they are not triggering any spam filter. – Kim Steinhaug May 01 '22 at 16:21
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Plivo Sales engineer here. This is indeed an issue with the carrier marking your messages as spam. We can definitely help you overcome this. Could you please drop an email to ramya(at)plivo.com and we can sort this out?

Ramya Raghu
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    it's not just a carrier issue. We send out this same message to thousands of people everyday. We talked to support and they said that after about 250 messages from the same number, that we would be capped as well. The solution from Plivo was to use multiple numbers but that's not a good solution to our problem. We're confused because Twilio doesn't have that cap. – user402516 Jul 29 '16 at 15:43
  • I understand your concern. Please drop me an email and we'll try to sort it out. – Ramya Raghu Aug 02 '16 at 14:22
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You need to contact with Plivo support , there may be problem for number prefix for country like if you are using twilio you have to add +(with country prefix) but not in Plivo. It will be better to contact with Plivo support.

Thank You

Shyam
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I dont know how Pilvo work but usually with SMSC there is Message Queue associated sometimes with each SMPP Client and also with Mobile Station. You can't always send messages until your certain number of request are still pending. there is a specific error code that SMSC sent to its client about message queue overflow.

Jamil Farooq
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BADABING BADABOM! After having a look in the Plivo administration I noticed a new option under other-settings "Automatic Encoding Of Unicode Characters". As Norway uses inernational characters this is definately a setting for me, and after enabling it all SMS are delivered as expected. So remember to enable this setting.

MAKE SURE TO ENABLE THIS:
Path: Plivo admin / Messages / Settings / Other settings
Feature: Automatic Encoding Of Unicode Characters -> Enable

Kim Steinhaug
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