Yes. Although a few networks do not provide the message status information, most do and they will be shown with the message in the Messenger Inbox

No. Standard SMS does not provide this sort of information. The closest you can get is if the carrier notifies us when the message is received on the handset.

Yes. When sending an email set the option for a “read receipt” (each email system has a different way of doing this so see the relevant vendor for more information).

When a message is processed with a read receipt request, Messenger waits for a few minutes and sends an email back that has the status information for each recipient. If you have login credentials you can also view this information in the Messenger Inbox.

Yes. Some languages may not display correctly on some handsets and carrier networks.

If you are using a UTF-16 language (Chinese, Cyrillic etc), your character payload per SMS message part decreases to 70 characters in the first part, and 134 characters in the second part and 201 in the third part.

This means if you send a message that is 100 characters (for example) in a UTF-16 language, you will be charged for 2 messages.

Bulletin attempts to send all messages to the carriers within seconds of receiving them, but SMS is a best effort, store and forward process which means that the carriers may have their own queuing, delivery and expiry policies.

Once Bulletin has passed the message to the carrier delivery is beyond our control, however, we will request status updates and use these to keep you informed of the of the message if these are available.

You can use the status information to decide whether you should resend the message or use an alternative communication method.

If individual (customised) messages are prepared and sent then about 3000 per minute can be sent through the Bulletin API. The speed of message delivery will also be impacted by:

• Network connection speed between your client and Bulletin.
• Method of connecting to Bulletin Connect (HTTP is faster than a SOAP connection).
• The destination carrier. Some carriers throttle message delivery based on their network requirements.

The error field contains any string value the carrier returns to us and is very carrier/SMSC/UAS/developer dependent.

Yes. Any replies to messages you send out will also include a messageId that will link the reply to your original message.

The ID provided by your service is a string of up to 36 characters. If you are persisting this information to a database, that would be the field type to use.

No. Not at this time. If you require this feature then contact Sales.

There are two options (Polling and Pushing) to retrieve incoming messages, replies and status updates and it will depend on your network setup, resources and application requirements as to which best suits.

Polling is a client initiated connection to the Messenger API server and reduces firewall and proxy issues that can occur with the push method. More detail available about polling available here

The Push option has the Messenger Server connecting to a REST end point on your server each time a message (reply or status) is processed. More detail about Pushing via Callbacks available here

Before. The URL encoding is required in order for the request to be submitted to the Messenger API. Once we receive it it is decoded and then submitted to the the carrier in a format that they require. If you are not setting a fragmentationLimit on your request then ensure that the message length is less than 160 characters before URL encoding it.

We support Plain-Text and Unicode characters. We do not support Ringtones, IMelody, Operator Logos, or MMS