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With massive changes coming for SMS/MMS campaigns it can get very confusing.We have put together varied resources to simplify it for you.

Best Practice Guidelines

Cebod Telecom Messaging Service Policies and Best Practice Guidelines

These Cebod Telecom Messaging Service Policies and Best Practices Guidelines (“Guidelines”) are intended to provide general guidance and are the proprietary information of Cebod Telecom, Inc. (“Cebod Telecom”). These Guidelines are provided for informational purposes only, and Cebod Telecom makes no warranties in these Guidelines. These Guidelines are not inclusive or exhaustive and are subject to change at Cebod Telecom’s discretion, at any time. Cebod Telecom reserves the right in its sole discretion to remove or deny any traffic which does not comply with these Guidelines.

1.0 Introduction
The Cebod Telecom messaging solution supports superior quality and high integrity communications. Spam or unwanted messaging is forbidden. To protect consumers and the ecosystem from abuse, Cebod Telecom enforces guidelines designed to promote best practices for the exchange of messages. The viability of the messaging ecosystem is dependent on consumer perception of messaging as a trusted and convenient communication environment. These Guidelines are intended to preserve the credibility and utility of the ecosystem. The objective of these Guidelines is to enable wanted messages and prevent unwanted or deceptive messages. While these Guidelines are intended to encourage correct behaviors, the spirit behind them is equally important. Message senders acting in bad faith to thwart or undermine the spirit of these Guidelines should expect to experience penalties.

2.0 Enforcement
Policy enforcement is performed at several points during message delivery including:
1. Cebod Telecom policy management systems.
2. Aggregator policy management systems (e.g., Sybase, Syniverse, Zipwhip).
3. Carrier policy management systems. (e.g., T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T Wireless)

3.0 Violations
Violations of Guidelines may result in one or more of the following resolutions taken by Cebod Telecom, aggregator or carrier:
1. Blocking of individual messages
2. Blocking of phone numbers
3. Repeated violation may result in termination of messaging or other network services
4.0 Definitions

Blacklisting: Numbers which have sent repeated known spam/unwanted content are subject to automatic blacklisting without notification for up to 30 days. Multiple or repeat offenses may result in permanent blacklisting. Additionally, numbers which have been reported by industry partners for spam/unwanted content may also be subject to permanent blacklisting.

Consumer: An individual person who subscribes to specific wireless messaging services or messaging applications. Consumers do not include agents of businesses, organizations, or entities which send messages to consumers. Consumers are natural persons with uniquely assigned phone numbers (long codes i.e. local phone numbers) which can be dialed.

Non-Consumer: A business, organization or entity which uses messaging to communicate with consumers. Examples may include but are not limited to, large-to-small businesses, financial institutions, schools, medical practices, customer service entities, non-profit organizations and political campaigns.

Consumer Person-to-Person (P2P): Consumer (P2P) messaging is sent by a consumer to one or more consumers and is consistent with typical consumer operation (i.e., message exchanges are consistent with conversational messaging among consumers). Some consumers utilize automation to assist in responding to communications. For example, a consumer may direct their messaging service to auto reply to a phone call in order to inform the caller about the consumer’s status (e.g., “I’m busy” or “Driving now, can’t talk”). Such use of automation to assist consumers in their composition and sending of messages falls within the attributes of typical consumer operation. In contrast, automation in whole or in part used by non-consumers to facilitate messaging is not a typical consumer operation.

Non-Consumer Application-to-Person (A2P): Messages sent from an application, typically web-based, to a mobile subscriber. Some common use cases include two-factor authentication (2FA), travel notifications, banking alerts or marketing messages. A2P delivery methods are either via toll-free messaging service or soon to be implemented 10DLC (10-digit long code).

Fingerprinting: The process of extracting data points from identified spam content is known as “fingerprinting”. Once message content has been fingerprinted as spam, all content found to be correlated to that fingerprint will be blocked in the future. Fingerprints do not expire or age out of existence.

MM4: MM4 is a 3GPP protocol for MMS service which covers the routing of an MMS from an originator MMS relay/server to a recipient MMS relay/server. MM4 is based on SMTP (email) protocol. MM4 is an extension of Internet simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) according to STD 10 (RFC 2821).

Multimedia Message Service (MMS): Facilitates group messaging and allows for the exchange of multimedia content between mobile devices including video, pictures and audio.

REST API: Application programming interface (API) used to establish messaging connectivity for sending and receiving messages and other service-related access.

Short Message Service (SMS): Commonly known as “text messaging” is a service for sending and receiving messages of up to 160 characters to mobile devices. Longer messages will be fragmented into smaller message fragments. Maximum character length per message fragment varies depending on the character set used in the body of the message, whether GSM default alphabet or Unicode.
Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP): SMPP is an open, industry-standard Internet protocol designed to provide a flexible data communication interface for the transfer of SMS messages between external short messaging entities (ESME), routing entities (RE), and short message service centers (SMSC).
Unwanted Messages: May include, but are not limited to, unsolicited bulk commercial messages (i.e., spam); “phishing” messages intended to access private or confidential information through deception; other forms of abusive, harmful, malicious, unlawful, or otherwise inappropriate messages; and messages which require an opt-in but did not obtain such opt-in (or such opt-in was revoked)

Please refer to the PDF for detailed information regarding the Best Practice Guidelines.

Best Practice Policies and Guidelines

Benefits of Registering

Improved Deliverability
Once you complete the registration process you are allocated trust scores. This process pre-approves the campaign, and you can be assured that your messages will not be flagged or blocked by carriers. Your deliverability will improve as to what message you’re sending and to whom will already be on record.

High Throughput
The idea of Brand Registration is to also give valid businesses a higher throughput if there is a valid use case. Throughput is determined based on who is sending the message (the Brand) and what is being sent (the Use Case/campaign), not on the number of phone numbers associated with the Campaign. The best course of action is to go through the vetting process, declare a Use Case, and provide a detailed explanation of the Campaign. The info you give will be used to determine – trust score and together with the use case, it will determine the throughput, so you will be able to reach a larger customer base in a short span of time.

Customer Trust
Since the goal is to deliver legitimate campaigns and the campaign registry will be catching spam or invalid brands and campaigns right in the beginning, the end-users will receive only those messages that are screened and approved. Getting relevant messages builds confidence within the customers and their trust in the brand and the messages that are being received increases.

If these benefits are not enough to convince you to register with the Campaign Registry, just know that by not registering not only are you compromising the deliverability and throughput rates and trust of your customers but also there are high chances of your messages being blocked or flagged and there might be penalty fees related to it. Therefore, it’s best to register rightaway!

Best Practices to Register

First and the most important is to be transparent and honest. You do not want to be in a situation where you are flagged for an error in your brand information or other information requested.

Secondly, we advise you to be clear and detailed, especially for special use cases. Your use case is what you are using that campaign for. This lets the wireless career know what type of messaging to expect.

Below is a list of the use cases that you can select from. When reviewing a campaign, carriers will look at the campaign description and see if it matches the content of the messages being sent.