When receiving MMS messages through Twilio, some phones/service providers may split multiple attachments up into multiple, separate text messages even though the originator of the text message attached them into the same text message.
When receiving the messages, is there some way (hopefully a key of some kind) that my app can use to determine that multiple messages coming in should be grouped together and consider part of the same text message?
Twilio supports inbound concatenated messages up to 1,600 characters. Inbound messages over 160 characters will also be received on your Twilio phone number as one single message.
While this is dependent upon carrier like you said, you can always check a messages instance resource, where messages are easily identified by their Sid.
And as Phil mentioned, if you are experiencing unexpected behavior send examples of those messages to Twilio Support for further examination.
Related
we are looking at socket io implementation for a chat application.
Finding acknowledgement support to handle missing messages while broadcast we are looking at acknowledgement support.
as per documentation socket io does not have support for callbacks in broadcast / rooms.
e.g. in "Room 1" we send broadcast message to all sockets within that room. how we check without call back that some users/sockets missed the message. and how we will handle that in system.
below code does not work.
io.sockets.in(data.room).emit('message', data, function(responseData){
console.log(responseData);
});
according to below issue
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-redis/issues/30
Callbacks are not supported when broadcasting.
what are the other methods to handle this scenario.
In order to solve your problem, the messages for a room need to be persisted somewhere, and then re-sent to individual clients as needed.
The most obvious place to store messages is server-side, in a datastore (e.g. Redis). Store each conversation effectively as a list of events, appending new events as they happen.
A simple scheme works as follows:
Each broadcast message has a UUID attached to it. When the server handles a new message, it appends the message to the list for that 'room'.
When a client connects/re-connects, it sends a message (e.g. 'LAST_MESSAGE_RECEIVED') indicating the UUID of the last message it received.
When the server receives one of these 'LAST_MESSAGE_RECEIVED' messages, it checks if that is the latest message for the room, and if not, it emits a message just to that individual socket with an array of the missed messages. The client is now back up-to-date.
Alternative: if you don't need to keep a history after a conversation ends, you could be clever and use the fact that other clients are already storing the messages, and ask the clients to re-send messages in a peer-to-peer kind of way. This avoids you needing to have your own server-side datastore.
We're having this weird problem with Twilio SMS messages hanging with status.
We have tried sending from different Twilio phone numbers to make sure it isn't a problem with that particular number being blocked and none of them go through.
Our system uses SMS messages in the standard form of two-step authentication with a code and a short message to the user inside the SMS body.
The carrier that the message sent is failing is Tune Talk (A Malaysian one).
The error in the Twilio Logs/Console I see is:
Status: Undelivered
Error: (Error: 30008) Unknown error. None
Message SID if it's in any way useful is: SM1024a2d519cf4f6bbfcbc838587cb2af
Any insight on why this is happening would be greatly welcomed.
We had also the same issue with phones that used to receive messages.
The problem is carrier blocking/filtering.
Every carrier uses different filters.
Some carriers block messages with 90% the same content, others use rate filtering (1 message per second or more) others use a combination. The blocking is not forever thought.
Twilio gives the following possible solutions:
Check that the phone you were sending to is turned on and can receive SMS
Ensure that the phone is not roaming off network. We cannot
guarantee message delivery on roaming phones.
Try sending to other phones who have the same mobile carrier.
If messages to other phones go through, the issue is likely device
related. Try rebooting the device or contact the mobile carrier for
help.
If you are sending SMS from an alphanumeric sender ID, see if using
a Twilio phone number works better. We’ve observed that certain
networks may block alpha sender IDs.
Try sending a shorter message to the phone, with simple content that
does not include any special characters. This would give our support
team an idea as to whether the failure is related to concatenation
or character encoding.
Twilio support can help investigate what went
wrong with our carriers. Please open a support request and include a
minimum of 3 or more message SIDs where a 30008 error was thrown.
Per our carriers' requirements, these SIDs can be no older than 48
hours at most.
Check -> Error 30008
Another solution is to use a 5digit code phone number.
Boris, error 30008 is certainly less descriptive than one would hope. In this case, it would be best to send that Message Sid along to support where we can dig a little deeper into the specifics.
Though it doesn't sound like it in this case, if there were a problem with your code, you could check out a production ready account verification tutorial here.
Came here because of exactly the same problem. I have someone who successfully received SMSes just 12 days ago, using the same Australian number, getting a 30008 for every attempt to send to them today. That's a really average-quality error message right there.
The user states that they ported the number from Telstra to Vodafone, but that was 3 months ago. I'm guessing that the forwarding is broken:
http://www.commsalliance.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/2326/G565_2009.pdf
In particular:
1.4.4 Where internationally originated SMS is supported donor routing
must be supported wherever bilateral agreement exists for the
national leg, as international networks are not likely to access an
Australian mobile number portability database prior to routing the
message. However, certain limitations apply – see Appendix A.
Since Twilio aren't sending from an Australian number, they probably aren't looking through the number portability database. This would be my suspect cause for any failure to SMS route to a country with number portability.
I've had some of these errors when doing MMS's.
If I look at the detail in the Twilio console, there is additional detail and a secondary error message "12300 Invalid Content-Type. Attempt to retrieve MediaUrl returned an unsupported Content-Type."
I was putting images up on S3, but not setting the Content-Type of the image when I put it on S3.
In my case, the problem was that I was including a website URL in the message.
Once I removed it (replaced it with a simple name) it worked.
I'm not sure whether the issue was the URL itself (e.g. the network considers it spam) or the fact that it contained characters like /.
I set up a scheduling website at work which uses Twilio to send out sms messages with each person's next day assignment information as well as a link to the website where notes and everyone's next-day assignment is posted. Occasionally colleagues complain that they haven't received messages. Recently the problem has gotten much worse though is to be limited to people with AT&T and Sprint. People with Verizon and TMobile are get their messages without a problem.
A few more facts:
All of my code works well in testing and is consistent with Twilio's
instructions.
Twilio's logs list the messages as having been sent.
The people who's sms messages are not delivered tend to be at the end
of the alphabet
Anyone have any ideas what might be going on?
SMS messages the twilio logs show as sent which never arrive at the recipient's phone may be filtered by cell phone carriers as part of an effort to reduce spam sms messages. A website that sends out a batch of messages like the scheduling website you (I) describe may be particularly susceptible to such filtering since spam is also sent out in batches. The fact that recipients at the end of the alphabet tend to be blocked rather than those at the beginning might reflect an algorithm which flags earlier messages as suspicious and blocks subsequent ones that appear similar in that they contain the same website link.
In the past I was able to solve this problem by adding a 1 second delay between messages. That worked fine for my purposes. My site sent out the messages as a background job and with the 1 second delay about 25 sms messages get sent out over 2 minutes.
More recently AT&T and Sprint started blocking many more messages, though not all. At Jan 11, 15:04 PST, Twilio's status was aware of the problem and noted:
Identified - Messages with hyperlinks to goo.gl are being filtered on AT&T and Sprint. We are working with these carriers to address this filtering.
I was able to get around this problem by creating a shortened url using Bitly instead of Google's url shortening service.
Of note, Twilio is a great service but in the past their support folks were unaware that spam filtering could be blocking some of my sms messages. That's my prime motivation for posting about this issue here.
It seems that sites like mine can get caught in the crossfire between sms spammers and wireless carriers attempting to block them. Hopefully some day such sms spam filtering will get more sophisticated and stop blocking the messages sent by sites like mine.
I would love to hear if anyone with more sophisticated insight than mine has any comments.
Currently experiencing a really bad carrier filtering case through Twilio. Most messages sent to Verizon numbers are being blocked. According to Twilio support, Verizon recently implemented additional filtering methods to block A2P (Application-to-Peer) traffic.
Given this article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/att-verizon-try-to-prevent-ban-on-text-message-blocking/ it seems like Verizon's more aggressive filtering might be related to the recent repeal of Net Neutrality, and their goal is to make more money by forcing businesses to get a short code.
If your using 10 digit phone numbers I Would also look at this
https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/short-codes/why-would-i-want-a-short-code-instead-of-sending-sms-from-a-regular-us-phone-number-or-phone-numbers
Long codes are meant for person-to-person communications, and can send only 1 message per second. For high-volume, application-driven messaging, Twilio recommends using a short code. Short codes can send SMS and MMS at 30 messages per second, and this high throughput is perfect for applications needing to send time-sensitive messages to many users at once. Furthermore, since carriers vet and approve all short codes for their intended use, they are not subject to carrier filtering or suspension for heavy traffic.
I am connecting to TCP socket using spring integration. I send 2 different messages on an outbound gateway which returns same outputs i.e. header as well as payload.
Now I want to process reply messages differently and then aggregate into a single message which can then be processed by main service class.
I tried various techniques but nothing worked.
Is it feasible to do so? If yes, kindly help me out.
You need something to correlate the messages, maybe a header (e.g. the standard correlation id).
Use a header-enricher to set the correlation id header on each outbound message. Send the reply messages to an <aggregator /> with a simple release strategy (release-strategy-expression="size() == 2"). When the second reply is received, a message with a payload (collection of the 2 payloads) will be released.
Hypothetical: I want to send a single text message to all Verizon phones programmatically. I have multiple email gateways to use (obtained from the all-reliable wikipedia):
number#vtext.com
number#vzwpix.com
number#message.alltel.com
number#text.wireless.alltel.com
number#mms.alltel.net
I don't think that I'm guaranteed that any one of these will work and/or will still be in service (am I?) and I would not like to have to come back and change anything in the code at a later date.
Is there any way that I can make sure that I only send one text message to a given phone number when there are 5 possible gateways?
The only way way (that I know of) to ensure you only deliver one message to the recipient is to try each gateway sequentially until a message sends successfully, like some of the comments mentioned.
However, I've been sending a decent volume (>1500) of messages using #vtext.com lately and haven't noticed any bounces or downtime during sending. I have no way of knowing if every single message was delivered, but none of my test numbers have dropped a message yet. Most US carriers seem to have decent reliability on their gateways these days.
Just remember that SMS is still considered a best-effort service by most carriers. Even if you get your message to their servers successfully, there's no guarantee that the message will make it to its destination.