Receiving messages from subscribers
Screen: Incoming SMS, address /incoming. It opens on the Received SMS tab,
/incoming/received.
The section is a report: it shows the messages subscribers have sent you and the money each one brought or cost. Short numbers and keywords are arranged by support, and this page tells you what to ask for by name.
How a subscriber reaches you
A subscriber sends an ordinary SMS to a short number and begins the text with a keyword. In the report that keyword is called the prefix.
The short number is shared: the same number serves many companies at once. The keyword is what decides whose message this is. So the keyword is part of the address, not part of the text — publish the number and the keyword together, in one line, everywhere.
SMS-Docs matches the keyword leniently: the letters that look the same in the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet count as one letter, and the case of the letters does not matter. Lenient has its limits — a mistyped word is a different word, and the message goes to whoever owns that word.
The automatic reply
A keyword can carry a reply that is sent back to the subscriber by itself. It is set up together with the keyword, and you see the result in the report: the row of a message shows the text that came in and the text that went out. An answer that depends on what the subscriber wrote is a separate mechanism — SMS-Docs asks your own system what to say, and this documentation describes it on the page about handing incoming messages over.
The status of a message
Every row in the report carries a Status column — the state that message was left in. It is the first place to look when a subscriber says they wrote and got nothing back: a message that is in the report was received, and the status says what happened after that.
Money goes both ways
An incoming message can bring money in, and it can cost money. The report shows an Income column per row, and its bottom line carries two totals at once — what was earned and what was charged. Which of the two your keyword produces, and at what rate, comes from your agreement, and support states it when the keyword is set up.
Limits, prices and the set of available options are tuned to your account. This documentation gives the meaning rather than the figure: the current value is always shown on the screen, next to the field it applies to.
What the section contains
| Page | Address | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Received SMS | /incoming/received | Everything that came in, line by line |
| Tariffs | /incoming/tariffs | The terms on which messages to the shared short numbers are settled |
Getting a short number and a keyword
Write to support: they issue the short number, register the keyword, set the automatic reply and connect the hand-over to your system. The same conversation names the terms that apply to you.