Choose originator for your text messages

When you send a text message from your phone, your own number is always set as originator (sometimes called sender ID). This way the recipient can see who sent it, and if they saved your number as a contact in their phone, your name will be displayed instead of the number

When you send SMS using our services there are more options to choose from. All of these options are not available in all destinations, contact us if you want to know more about the possibilities in the country where your recipients resides.

For starters you will need to decide if the recipient should be able to reply to your message of not. Then you can choose from the different options in the below sections.

2-way SMS

For the recipient to be able to reply to your message, a number must be set as originator. If the recipient has previously saved the number as a contact, it might sometimes look like the originator is the contact name, but there is always a number behind it that was sent with the message.

Under Settings in the Toolbox you can decide what your messages should look like, when we send them for you.

saved contact numeric sender

If you want the recipient to be able to reply to your message, you have the following options:

Number – you can pretty much set any number here, your own for example. If you put your own number here, it will look like you sent the message from your phone and if the recipient answers, their phone will send the reply straight to your phone.

Reply-SMS – we will choose one of our own numbers as originator. If the recipient replies, the answer will be sent to our system and then we will send it to either your email or an url, according to your settings. This is a powerful functionality with many options, you can read more about reply-SMS here.

Short code – if you hire a keyword from us, you can use our short code as originator on your messages. The recipient must always remember to first type your keyword before their reply, for it to be able to reach you. So this is not commonly used for 2-way SMS.

1-way SMS

If you don´t want the recipient to be able to reply to your message, we must send a text as originator instead of a number. You might have seen this yourself, when you have a package to collect at the post office, or when the dentist sends you an appointment reminder.

If you send a text as originator, it is not possible to also send a number so that the recipient can reply. It is impossible as the SMS protocol only supports one originator to be set for a message. If you try to reply to a message with a text originator, most phones will notify you that it is not possible. Unfortunately iPhone does not, but invents a number that is not real and “sends” you reply even if it will never be delivered.

If you don´t want the recipient to be able to reply, you have the following options:

Text – you can put a text of maximum 11 characters. We recommende that you use only the following characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, hyphen (-) point (.) and space as other characters will be replaced by some operators/phones in different ways.

Subject – if you want to be able to have different originator for different messages sent via email, you can choose the setting Subject. We will then use the first 11 characters of your email subject line as originator, if the subject line is longer than that we will cut it and also put the entire subject line first in the message. If you don´t add any subject line, we will use Reply-SMS as originator, since an originator is always required.

iPhone and text originators

Historically, there has sometimes been issues with delivering SMS to iPhones if the text originator was very short (1-3 tecken). We recommend that you send some test messages to some different iPhones if you choose to use a text originator shorter than 4 characters.