Forum Discussion
Consumer messaging of our URL is being blocked
We've been having a steady increase of customers calling us to report that T-Mobile is blocking their SMS text messages to other people on T-Mobile. To be clear, our company does NOT send out any SMS text to our customers at all, ever. However, we have a customer referral program where individual customers can send other people a custom coded link. These links all run on the same domain (our company domain). So it appears our (and T-Mobile's) customers are having their personal texts blocked whenever our domain is included… presumably because it is being interpreted as unsanctioned non-consumer messaging. It is not. Who can we contact to ensure our domain name is not getting flagged and preventing T-Mobile customers from sending personal text to other T-Mobile customers?
Unfortunately no, it's not related to SSL. We use https exclusively. Our company doesn't even use SMS messaging, however we have a (very popular) referral program such that our customers share their referral links (which run on our domain) via SMS and other means. It's ironic, customers are so excited about our offerings that they share a lot and T-Mobile subsequently blocks the messages because they see what they deem to be too much volume of person to person texts that include our domain. We've been told by the T-Mobile tech department to ask our complaining customers to contact T-Mobile to complain as well. We do that, but ultimately a lot of our customers end up just switching cellular networks (it's that frustrating to them). There needs to be a better way.
So not sure if this is the same issue but we are having messages blocked to T-mobile devices if the link is an http link. If the link is https then it works fine.
I have an open ticket on this, but didn’t expect much in the way of help so did some additional troubleshooting on my own to find a work around,
I called into the general customer support line and spoke with a very nice rep. While he of course wasn't able to do anything to help with this, he did acknowledge and confirm that this is likely what is happening… i.e. individual customers attempting to SMS other individual customers on T-mobile are having their messages filtered out when our company domain is included (because their filter is incorrectly determining the messages to be non-consumer… which of course they are not). He gave me a phone number to call directly into T-Mobile tech support, but unfortunately when I try that I get stuck as it requires a "dealer code" and if you don't have one it hangs up on you.
Does anyone know how to get a hold of someone with the authority to correct this type of problem? We've got 10'000's of customers and our company is not wanting to tell them the only remedy is to change cell carriers (that seems incredibly unnecessary, if only someone in authority could look at this). Anyone have ideas?
