If you input a USA or Canadian phone number to Carrier247(Carrier Type), it will return the type of phone it is:
If you input a phone number to Text@, Carrier247(USA), or Carrier247(International), it will return:
Carrier247(USA) works for USA and Canadian numbers. Carrier 247(USA) has number portability awareness for USA numbers, that means that when someone ports their phone number from one carrier to another, we know about it almost immediately, and we guarantee that our records will be updated within one business day, although they usually will be updated within an hour.
Unfortunately, due to regulations in Canada, we cannot provide local number portability data for Canadian phone numbers to customers unless they get approval from the Canadian Local Number Portability Consortium (CLNPC).
For Carrier247(USA), if the phone is wireless, it will also return:
The SMS and MMS Gateway Addresses can be used to send text messages and picture messages to wireless phones. The Gateway Addresses are email addresses of the carrier. To send a text to the recipient, you send an email message to the carrier using the Gateway Email Address, and the carrier sends your message to the recipient as an SMS or MMS message.
NOTE: Text@ and Carrier247(USA) are identical in function and price.
The Gateway Addresses are not available for Carrier247(International) since most international carriers don't provide them.
If the phone is wireless, it will also return the last date when the phone was ported from the last carrier to the current carrier. This information is currently automatically returned for Manual lookups only. For API lookups, it requires a specific option in the API call. It is an optional field for File Uploads.
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Once you sign up, you have three options to access the services:
No, we provide you with the SMS and MMS Gateway email addresses so that you can send the messages yourself.
Once our service supplies you with the Gateway email addresses, you can send the messages as you would regular emails (in text format, not HTML).
The maximum SMS length is 160 characters. MMS messages can be much larger.
When a customer replies to your text message, the reply will be delivered back to the email that you sent the message from. For example, if you send out messages using your Gmail account, replies from the message recipients will be sent to your Gmail account.
Alternately, you can add a link in your SMS/MMS message which will bring them to a
web page where they can reply and/or do other transactions.
While most people realize they can send text messages via a carrier's email gateway, most don't realize that they can send multimedia messages as well. Many carriers have two separate email domains; one for SMS and one for MMS. Others use the same email domain for both. Sending MMS has several advantages. First, the character-count limits which exist for SMS messages (which vary by carrier) don't exist for mms messages. Second, you can attach pictures or sound files to your email messages (the same way you'd attach them when sending to regular email addresses), and your customers will be able to receive them along with your text message. Note that different carriers have different requirements for pictures, and if a picture doesn't meet the criteria, it won't get displayed. We've found that making your jpg file as small as possible is important (Linux users: convert -quality 2 inputfile outputfile). Also, we've found that 320x240 pixels seems to work well for most carriers.
Text messages sent to wireless phones via email (SMTP) are covered by the Can-Spam act of 2003. This act prohibits sending unwanted commercial email messages to wireless devices without prior permission. The second link below offers a really great explanation, including a good description of what constitutes a commercial message:
The free services (and many of the pay services as well) don't take number portability into account. As a result, when a subscriber for carrier A decides to change to carrier B and keep their same number, most services won't know about the change. For USA numbers, our services will be aware of the carrier change almost instantly.
Besides the $12 monthly membership fee, there is a per-lookup fee of $0.005 (one half penny) for each Text@, Carrier247(USA), or Carrier247(Carrier Type) lookup, and $0.006 for each Carrier247(International) lookup.
There is no charge for unsuccessful lookups.
Text@, Carrier247 (USA), and Carrier247(Carrier Type) support all countries in country code 1; the USA, Canada and some Caribbean countries.
Carrier247 (International) supports all countries, worldwide.
We don't send the SMS messages. Text@ and the Carrier247 services give you the email address and you need to send the email yourself. Unfortunately, there is no delivery confirmation for sending messages this way.
These service can only return the email-to-SMS gateway addresses for mobile phone numbers, since gateway addresses don't exist for landlines.
In the result file you receive, there's a column called "is_wireless" which indicates whether a phone number belongs to a wireless phone or not. Check and see if the numbers you submitted are landlines.
You may have a formatting error in your file. See topic 6 in this category for file formatting information.
No. We don't offer any guarantee. But we get the carrier-lookup information from the same source that the wireless carriers themselves use for routing their customers' text messages. So the carrier data should be extremely accurate and up-to-date.
As far as the email gateway addresses we provide, we do our best to keep these up to date. However, there are some carriers we do not have the information for. In fact, a few of the smaller carriers don't even offer an email-to-SMS gateway address.
No, we don't offer any guarantee. But, we get the carrier-lookup information from the carriers, so the carrier data should be extremely accurate and up-to-date.
As for the SMS and MMS Gateway Addresses, we do our best to keep these up to date. However, there are some carriers we do not have the information for. In fact, a few of the smaller carriers don't even offer email-to-SMS/MMS Gateway Addresses.
Your file should be in Excel (.xlxs) or .csv format.
If you have more than one phone number per line (row), you will need to run the file multiple times. For example, if you have three columns of phone numbers, you will need to run the file three times. Each time you run the file, you will have to specify which column contains the numbers that you want to use for that run.
Don't forget that, for Carrier247 (International), you will need to include the country code before the rest of the number.
The maximum file size that can be uploaded is 20 Megabytes.
You can find a list of the carriers and carrier ids for Text@ and Carrier247 (USA) at:
https://www.data247.com/lists/usa_carriers.txt
and for Carrier247 (International) at:
We've found that when people aren't receiving text messages, it's usually because the phone carriers are blocking them. Unfortunately, each carrier has it's own set of criteria for determining which messages are SPAM and which are not. But usually it's because of one of the following:
1. Message content - it's possible that certain words in the message are raising flags, and are making the carrier mark the message as SPAM.
2. Messages sent per hour - If a large number of messages are being sent out at once, this could also raise red flags. If you have a lot of messages to be delivered which are not time-sensitive, it's best to throttle the sending of them as much as possible.
3. IP address - Sometimes the IP address that is sending the message can be blocked by some carriers. For Data247's Text@ service, the IP address doesn't matter because you're sending the message via email.
4. Email address - Carriers may block an email address, or an entire web domain if they believe SPAM messages are coming from them. If you're using a business email account (as opposed to a free Yahoo or Gmail account), there are things you can do to increase your email's reputation. Here's a link to an article which may be helpful for this:
https://postmarkapp.com/guides/how-to-improve-domain-reputation-for-better-email-deliverability
If you are using a free email account, you may want to try using a different one, or switching to a business email account and following the suggestions in the above article.