Question 1

What is sender name and how to manage them?

Accepted Answer

Sender name - a string that will be displayed to your recipient as the sender of a message.

This name may contain non-accented letters, numbers, periods, pluses, hyphens, and underscores.

The sender's name looks like an email and consists of 2 parts:

Name
Domain The name should be related to your company name, brand, or website. You can't use a generic sender name like: info, otp, bank, sms and etc. Each company uses its own unique sender name and each sender name is moderated before being applied. To obtain the sender name, go to Dashboard -> Sender names -> New sender name. Follow the instructions on the page. If the sender's name will be rejected or already taken, we will contact you for updates. Verifying and activation of sender name take up to 2 business days. In some cases, it can take a little bit more time if we will have some doubts about your relation to the selected name, and will need to provide some proof of your relationship.

A dedicated sender name service is equivalent to renting hardware/server to keep your sender name working

The cost of the sender name consists of:

Once-off hardware setup fee
Monthly payment for hardware

What are the benefits of a dedicated sender name?

Your recipients will trust messages more if the sender's name is identical to the brand or company they know.
You will be able to receive inbound messages from y

Question 2

What are iMessage deep links and how to use them?

Accepted Answer

Deep link is a simple link to an application that allows you to immediately open this application with the options you need. We recommend using them to make it easier for your contacts to initiate a conversation with your sender name.

Ho to create it

For example, if your sender name is john@imsg.tel, then your deep link for this sender will be: imessage://john@imsg.tel After pressing this link on iPhone, iPad, or Mac, it will immediately open the Messages app where this sender name will be typed as the recipient. Looks easy, right?

You can also add a body parameter to this link so that you can pre-fill the text that will be sent. For example imessage://john@imsg.tel&body=Hello In this case, your contact will be enough just press return/enter, and everything is done! Your contact successfully sent you a text in iMessage.

You can also use these links to put them in the text, like here. As a result, using deep links will help your contacts quickly initiate a conversation without manually entering your sender name.

| In the dashboard, in your sender name settings, you will find a section where you can easily copy the already prepared link for your sender. || Keep in mind that imessage://... links will only work on Apple operating systems. I

Question 3

Is it possible to send an outbound text first?

Accepted Answer

At the moment, to send outbound texts to a contact, you need to get consent to this from them. Therefore, you can only send a message after they initiate a conversation. This will be considered as consent from the contact, after which you can send them any messages.

| To make it easier for your contact to start a conversation, you can send them a deep link to your dedicated sender name.

Why you can't send a message first?

In short: Apple doesn't like when their services are used for spam. When your contact receives a message from an unknown contact, they will have the option "Report Junk". If your recipients start to report you, then all your subsequent messages may have the Not delivered status at the Apple layer, and your texts may never be delivered to your new contacts. We can't tell you the exact number of reports that would be enough to block your sender name. In some cases, one report is enough (if it is a new sender name), and in some cases, it is enough to receive several reports within a short time period (will be considered as active spamming)

My contacts provided me consent outside of iMessage to receive texts. Can it be used as consent for iMessage?

In short: No, any consent receiv

Question 4

Sandbox environment

Accepted Answer

The sandbox allows you to test inbound/outbound messaging without using your credits or purchasing a dedicated sender name. You can use this feature to test the API before paying or using it in a production environment.

|| Messages sent within the Sandbox will always contain technical information at the end of each message.

To use the sandbox, you need to add a phone number or email as a sandbox contact in the Dashboard -> Conversation API -> Settings, then initiate a conversation with the sandbox sender name by pressing Compose message in sandbox from your Mac or iPhone.

You must set a phone number or email that you set up as Start new conversation from in the Messages app. Check this article to learn more about this setting.

In this case, all your requests for this contact will be force-marked as the sandbox. Sandbox works only with one-to-one messaging. With group chats, this feature may be unstable (most likely you will able to accept inbound messages but not reply there).

| Please note that when your implementation is ready to use in a production environment, you may need to remove the specified contact from the sandbox list. Otherwise, all requests related to this contact will continue to be processed in the sandbox.

|| Don't use sandbox messaging in a production environment. If y

Question 5

Link Preview Behavior on iOS

Accepted Answer

There are multiple factors that affect whether an iPhone make links active, shows a preview for a link, and what the preview looks like:

Is the recipient ever replied to your message?

In this case, iMessage may display links as inactive if they receive messages from an unknown contact with whom there has never been two-way messaging before and who has not been saved in the recipient's contacts list. To resolve it, you can easily provoke the recipient to reply to something to your message. For example, ask the recipient to respond with any emoji if they want more information about your product. When a message will be replied to, then the Messages app will mark your connection as two-way and the links will be automatically activated.

Is the sender saved in the recipient's contacts list?

According to our experience, iOS will only render a preview for links sent in iMessage if the sender is saved in the recipient's contact list. Otherwise, the URL will be displayed in the body of the message.

Is the URL at the very beginning or the very end of the message?

iPhones will only display a link preview if the URL is at the beginning or the end of the message. iOS will not render a preview for a URL in the middle of a message, or even just surrounded by periods or quotation marks.

Is there only a single URL in the message, or multiple?

iPhones will only display

Question 6

Can I use your API for promotion/marketing messaging?

Accepted Answer

It’s possible if you purchase a dedicated sender name and receive consent from your contacts. By consent that will means they should initiate a conversation with your dedicated sender name. But you need to take into account that there are some risks when sending such messages. || Our service is designed to send only high-quality texts to recipients who expect to hear from you. If you try to distribute through the API spam, phishing, scam, fakes, inappropriate texts, or any other content that recipients can report as junk, then your access may be restricted or blocked. Also, your texts from a dedicated sender name may have a "Not delivered" status if iMessage marks your texts as junk. In such cases, according to our terms of use, refund requests will never be reviewed.

What messages can be marked as promotion/marketing?

In short: Any messages with almost the same text that you will try to send in a short period of time. Keep in mind that if you try to send 100 almost the same messages in one minute, it will most likely be flagged as a marketing blast, and your sender name will be marked as suspicious. If this happens, all your further messages with to any contacts may have the "Not delivered" status. The same rule applies if you start sending almost the same text from a different sender name. Since iMessage will already know that such text was once marked as "Junk", then on all other sender names you can also get the status as "suspicious". You need to take into ac

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