Many of our clients need to send messages in bulk to customers and prospects. SMS bulk messaging has been the subject to scrutiny in recent times because it can be used to send spam messages. Operators and regulatory bodies are sensitive to the number of messages that can be sent per minute from a given number. Limiting send rates, however, can have negative business impact in the form of reduced customer reach.
Plivo’s messaging platform solves this problem by delivering messages to downstream operators using smart queuing based on the type of source number used and the destination country. We maintain a dedicated queue for each of your source numbers. If you need to send messages using the Plivo SMS API to a specific destination country at a throughput greater than what's available from a single source number, you can increase your overall capacity by distributing your traffic across a pool of Plivo numbers to get the throughput you need while staying within the recommended per-number rate limits.
Do I need to contact you to get this feature enabled on my Plivo account?
No — smart queuing is enabled for Plivo accounts by default.
How do I determine the status of a message? Can I see whether it's queued or has been sent out?
When a message is in the queue, its status is set to "queued." The message is marked as "sent" once it has been passed on to downstream carrier networks. For more information about message statuses, visit our Message Object API reference documentation.
Are these the only rate limits that apply to my SMS traffic?
You can send SMS requests to Plivo at any rate you wish. All messages are put into the primary queue and dequeued based on the account-level messages per second rate configured for your account. Messages are then throttled for final delivery by our smart queue based on the source type and destination country.
Will the smart queue process messages in the order in which they were sent to Plivo?
Yes, messages are never processed out of order.
How are long (multipart) messages handled?
Multipart messages are enqueued, dequeued, and processed as a single entity at all times. The dequeue rate of a message is autoadjusted based on the size of the message to ensure that your traffic remains compliant regardless of the size of the message. For instance, if you send a two-part SMS message from a US source number, the message would be dequeued two seconds after the previous message in that source number’s queue.