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I've been researching the possibility of bots messaging users via Facebook Messenger without any prior bot-user interaction. Let's say I have the user's phone number and I'd like to reach out to them first using my bot, then continue the conversation if they opt-in.

The only thig I found is customer matching described in the following thread: Start conversation without user interaction in Facebook Messenger However, the link to documentation doesn't work anymore and in general all the info I've been able to found about it dates back to 2019 at best.

Was customer matching feature development dropped by Facebook? Is it impossible for bot's to engage in conversations with users without prior interaction via a Facebook page / messenger?

kash
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    So, you want to spam people? There might be a reason FB doesn't want you to send unrequested messages to their users. – Neil Oct 12 '21 at 08:58
  • I think this was only in a limited public beta to begin with, at least that's what https://developers.facebook.com/community/threads/362757114403248/ suggests. They probably scrapped it due to how it was received. – CBroe Oct 12 '21 at 09:09
  • If you check [archive.org's cached version of the docs](https://web.archive.org/web/20200804204547/https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/customer-matching), in combination with the Send API this would only have shown a _request_ to the user, if they did not interact with your bot before. _"If a matching user is found and they have not previously opted-in to your bot, a message request will be shown to the user inside Messenger. The user can then read the message and decide whether to accept. If the user accepts, you can onboard them to your bot's main experience."_ – CBroe Oct 12 '21 at 09:20
  • @CBroe Thank you, I believe I got my answer from that cached version of the docs where it states that the API was deprecated in 2020. – kash Oct 12 '21 at 09:34

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