Automatic sender injection and when to override it

Who the recipient actually sees

If you do not name a sender, the platform picks one from the connection that carries the message. Naming one explicitly takes priority everywhere.

3 min read · updated 2026-10-13

The default is to choose for you

A connection can have several sender numbers bound to it, each with a weight. When a request does not specify a sender, the platform injects one from the connection that ends up carrying the message, distributing across the bound numbers by weight. The caller does not have to know which number went out.

That rotation is what keeps several numbers useful: provider limits are usually per number, so spreading one connection across its numbers raises real throughput without changing anything upstream.

Explicit wins

A sender named on the request takes priority over automatic selection. Use it when a specific number carries meaning — a support line, a national sender ID, or a number the recipient will recognise and reply to.

Where this touches opt-out

  • Suppression is recorded per recipient, not per sender, so switching numbers does not route around an opt-out.
  • A reply goes back to the number the recipient last saw, so an inconsistent sender set makes replies harder to reason about.
  • Automatic rotation means the sender is decided per message, not per campaign — read the message record if you need to know which one went out.
Scope. Sender selection and suppression are SMS-channel behaviour.

Keep reading

Bring your own account

The platform has no provider account of its own. That one design decision changes who owns the numbers, who holds the quota, and who appears on the invoice.

Read the guide →

SMS segments and what you actually pay for

SMS is billed per segment, not per message. Whether your text fits in one segment depends on the character set it needs — and on the encoding you set on the connection.

Read the guide →

Opt-out handling

Opt-out is two halves: the suppression record, and the check that runs before a marketing message is handed to the provider. Both run through one shared normalisation, which is the part that usually breaks.

Read the guide →

Reading a delivery receipt

A receipt is a sequence of states, not a verdict. Treating an intermediate one as final is the most common way a sending dashboard ends up lying to you.

Read the guide →

Pacing, quotas and why we queue

Every connection carries a send rate. The platform queues to that rate instead of firing as fast as a provider will accept, because the fastest way to get throttled is to send at the speed that causes it.

Read the guide →

Routing and failover

Routes are ordered by priority and weighted within a connection. The point of the arrangement is that a provider rejecting sends degrades into slower sending, not into silence.

Read the guide →

Who decides whether a message is marketing

The platform asks you to declare what kind of message you are sending instead of inferring it from the text. That one field decides whether the opt-out gate applies — and the honesty of the declaration is yours.

Read the guide →

A timeout is not a failure

Sending is accepted asynchronously and there is no de-duplication key. Retrying a request you are unsure about sends a second message and bills for it.

Read the guide →

Two endpoints that look alike and are not

Delivery receipts and inbound replies are different endpoints, configured in different places in your provider’s console. Configure only the receipt URL and opt-out handling stops — silently, with no error anywhere.

Read the guide →

Getting a number back

A recipient who opted out can opt back in. The platform deactivates the suppression record rather than deleting it, so the consent trail survives.

Read the guide →

What happens when your callback is down

Terminal outcomes are pushed to a URL you control, with a small bounded retry. Your handler has to tolerate a repeat, and it should not expect a call for every message.

Read the guide →

Which rate limit you just hit

There are two throttles in front of a send: the one your plan sets, and a much higher one at the network edge. Both answer with the same status code, so the message text is what tells them apart.

Read the guide →

What the platform does not keep

Message content is not archived. What is kept is metadata — and among that metadata two fields are load-bearing, because without them a bill could not be reconciled.

Read the guide →