ChrisDutrow

Holy. Shit.

That would have been a freaking disaster if that happened to us, especially having to re-tool the application for new SIDs. I'm a little surprised that there is not a cooling off period after an account deletion as opposed to deleting everything immediately.

At least you got the numbers back.

What was the nature of the problem you had with them?

Mostly I can forget they exist and do other things with my business. But my use case is very vanilla: no outbound automated marketing, its used by only a few people at my specific company, we're not even a tech company -just blue collar stuff.

This year has been different though. I had to verify that I had a real business so that my number didn't get blocked on certain carriers, submitting the paperwork in the right way turned out to be kind of difficult, however I don't think this was something they had control over if I understand the situation correctly. One of the carriers blocked us anyway (They were blocking text messages with links to job info that I was sending to my employees). I used the ticketing system to get that problem fixed and they resolved it in a few days - I was under the impression it was kind of a complex problem too.

They also help us port numbers in from cell phones sometimes. And again the ticketing system is slow but they always get the problems resolved. None of these things being time sensitive, we were perfectly happy.

This type of thing is a difficult business problem for small and mid size businesses to solve. In this particular situation, I had a series of actions I was going to take to put out this particular fire. Normally I wouldn't do something like this, but my back was to the wall: * Call their sales number so I could plead my case to a real person within the company and have them put me in contact with someone * If that person refused - Call again and try with another sales person (This approach did not work because no one was answering the phone for sales, perhaps due to covid omicron?) * Post on HackerNews to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors. (This worked, so I did not have to move on to the next steps) * Post on StackOverflow to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Post on Reddit to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Use LinkedIn to track down people who worked at Twilio. Use a paid service to get their phone numbers and addresses from their names. Call some of the people. * If no one answered the phone, go by the houses of Twilio employees who lived in my area

Long term, I wasn't sure what I would do because getting all the code switched to another provider would have been a huge hassle and it would have seriously gotten in the way of some of my other business development efforts. So I'm glad that Greg and Jeff reached out and reassured me that they don't intend to run their business this way.

A more difficult problem is Google and Facebook. I have had valuable pages stolen from me on both platforms (ex-employee) And neither company would engage with me. We're talking maybe $100,000 in lost property because of the amount of business the pages would bring in. Someone mentioned in another post on here that people are actually able to use HackerNews to get Google's attention. If I had known this I would have tried that. I knew Twilio might respond because they very often would help me when I posted technical questions on Stackoverflow in the past. I didn't think google and facebook cared as much about their brand because they have a monopoly.

I think you are right that it's not a valid use case anymore, even if they still assert that it is, because the reality is that it caused this problem. Even if they had responded to me immediately, my phones would have been shut down overnight.

Also, I was looking into the pricing a few months ago and its kind of expensive because I'm actually paying for two text messages: One for the incoming one, and one for the forwarded one.

The code has been working this way since maybe 2015, possibly before (its been so long, I can't remember). I've been using Twilio since I think 2010. I started out just doing call forwarding and later on added text messaging when customers started to expect to be able to text message us.

At the time, it was a core use case. There was a tutorial and everything "Forward text messages to your phone in a few lines of code".

Which pricing tier do you use? I've been thinking of starting with the for a while. Now we use a hodgepodge of Skype and WhatsApp

It needs to be human readable, so maybe pig latin instead

Oh no, I didn't take it that way. I just thought what you said was very interesting and wanted to provide more information and confirm that you were correct.

I agree.

Although this particular thing may have happened because they got backed into a corner by the carriers. They might have been forced to scramble and suspend a bunch of accounts in order to protect themselves from being suspended. It's possible this might not have been a gambit to save money, but something they were almost forced to do without time to properly prepare. I'm just speculating, guessing.

Yeah I think we're on the same page here. I mean its a complicated problem, they're under pressure to solve it. They were backed into a corner by the carriers and suspended my account. Shit happens.

They just need a phone number. I actually called sales hoping I could plead my case and get them to connect me with someone. But I couldn't get connected with sales. If this was due to omicron and sales would have helped me, then this is truly an edge case.

Yes I think you are right. But I don't think Twilio allows it unless I somehow register the number and authenticate that I own.

I could be wrong, but I think they have a way for me to register my cell number so I could "spoof" messages sent from it. But I would first have to prove to them that I own the number.

It might be possible to register numbers with them, but they still could get in trouble with the actual carrier of the cell number so it might not even matter.

I'd be really curious to know if this is what happened. Whats more interesting is he lives in Spain and his cell phone is on a Spanish carrier.

I also understand and agree with your argument about why they might have done what they did. But I still needed to counter with what I did in order to protect my business.

It's not an unauthenticated open relay.

It's like if you had a restaurant and you wanted to use Twilio. You might forward text messages sent to the restaurant number hosted on Twilio to your personal cell phone number.

Which provider did you end up using?

Oh I didn't even realize they had SMS. I was just thinking I could use push messages instead of SMS.