SMS and Campaign Registry: Why It's Less Easy than People Think?
This crazy thing going on right now where if you are a business trying to text message your customers, so this is just maybe ordinary one to 1 messaging or you're doing some sort of a 2 p messaging or an application as messaging a person application to person, it might feel like it's impossible to get through and to deal with the campaign registry and k y c and, you know, your CPaaS company or, you know, whatever messaging company you're using to to send it. And, you know, AT and T and Verizon T Mobile and what they're doing, and it's all obtuse and nothing really makes sense, and that's rate limited, and there's this conversion to 10 d l c and and there's this this massive just mess going on for, you know, businesses trying to send text messages. But at the same time on the other side for a con you know, a person with a cell phone, like, I'm you get relentless amount of spam text messages. And so I don't really it's crazy to me that both are still the case. How is it impossible for a business to be able to register itself for p2p or a2p messaging, you know, to send to send text messages and at the same time, like, every day, my phone is just a barrage of spam SMS.
Speaker 1:It's just this weird quirky thing and it's and it creates this really strange problem where you're you know, if I'm I'm giving counsel to a company trying to work through their ATP messaging and they're having trouble, you know, with their existing carrier or looking for a new carrier or trying to change carriers or all these different things that are going on of explaining to them what the process is gonna be like to go through and, you know, and get registered with TCR and get approved and be able to send campaigns. And the reaction is almost like, you know, you could just see it on their faces. Like, they don't believe you because they you know, I mean, flat out, they feel like I'm lying to them. Then they start through the process, and they find out. Like, no, it's actually really difficult right now to go through start to finish and get and get your campaigns registered and to get approved and be able to actually send messages and get any any reasonable throughput.
Speaker 1:And these same people, you know, they're going through the process and see how hard it is. Well, then get bajillions of text messages on their their own cell phones that are, you know, just garbage. And on their their own cell phones that are, you know, just garbage. And it's like, well, how are these people sending it if I can't send it? And what's going on over here?
Speaker 1:You know, what do we do about it? It's just this really weird point in tech. And the closest thing I can think of that I remember is, you know early to mid 2000s when email spam had just gotten so egregiously bad and when organizations like spam house really started cracking down and we started seeing things like, spam assassin hit the market and the my SD new and there was all of a sudden open source projects that were applying Bayesian filtering that allowed us to actually create, like, some semblance of, like, an effective anti spam detection and gateway. And then we had postini come on the market, which was phenomenal and, was eventually acquired by Google and became a lot of what, you know, I'm sure Google still uses today and workspace for for, spam virus filtering, but it it really just reminds me of that. It's, you know, it's just it's strange to be at that age now where I'm into my second and third iteration of You know that same that you know, it's like the same problem just just reinventing itself into different ways and I mean, you know fortunately I started this thing when I was in my teens so you know I'll probably have one more cycle in this left I mean I should you know I should but it's it is just crazy I don't know what is going to happen and how long this takes to sort out and when we see you know how far does does this pendulum really push you know to clean up and do registrations and k y c's and where where TCR ends up being and how far that that swings to one extreme before it comes back and kind of normalizes and it'll probably normalize these things always end up in some sort of equilibrium of acceptance you know you still get tons of emails sent to you and hopefully most of it's filtered and and now companies have mechanisms with SPF and and more importantly DKM and, D Mark to protect their own brands to send out.
Speaker 1:And and that infrastructure hasn't really hit, you know, hit telco for for dialing and for SMS just yet. It's coming. Anyways, you know, back to the original point. Just just it's crazy. This week has been just filled with a lot of conversations with people really frustrated about trying to get, you know, registrations and being able to use their phone numbers to send messaging and interact with their customers.
Speaker 1:And and, you know, and and this has gotten really extreme to the point of, like, a customer's come and spent money with us. We have their cell phone number because they gave it to us and we need to be able to email them or text them confirmation that their product is shipped or their products available or or this is going on or hey, you know, come back and buy with us again. I mean, there's there's, you know, opt out mechanisms available and text messaging. It's really easy. All you have to do is just type stop.
Speaker 1:By the way, big big keyword there if you don't know about it. If if you're getting text messages from from just garbage and spam, you know, use your phone to report it as spam. So it's your carrier spam. But, you know, if you have a merchant that's that's messaging you and you just don't wanna get the message anymore, just reply st0p and Their platform will take will will block you. They'll immediately remove you from the system.
Speaker 1:It's it's very elegant and it works great. Anyways random rant today just on the current state of SMS and, you know, what's going on? I'm max Clark that was way under 20 minutes. Have a great day.
