Alerts - Subscribe/unsubscribe numbers

📘

NOTE:

To add this product to your account, contact a Telesign expert. This product is available for full-service accounts only.

This page walks you step-by-step through how to subscribe new end-user phone numbers to the Telesign Alerts service. Keep the reference page Alerts - Subscription files open in another window while you work on these steps.

Step 1: Generate subscription file

Create a process in your system that takes new end user phone numbers (when new customer info is saved, for example), and enters them as subscribe records into a new subscription file. Create another process that enter phone numbers from departing customers as unsubscribe records in this same file. This file should be in .csv format, with no quotation marks around field values.

1. Name the file according to the convention MONITOR_{timestamp}.csv, where {timestamp} indicates when the file is created. The timestamp should be in ISO-8601 format, with no milliseconds included, no special characters included, and "Z" included at the end.

Example file name

MONITOR_20190616T000723Z.csv

2. Add a header row to the file with the following headers: INDICATOR,MSISDN
3. Add a record to the file for each new phone number you want to subscribe. The INDICATOR value should be ADD, and the MSISDN value should be the phone number you want to subscribe (in international format, including the country code).
4. Add a record to the file for each old phone number you want to unsubscribe. The INDICATOR value should be DEL, and the MSISDN value should be the phone number you want to unsubscribe (in international format, including the country code).

Example file contents

INDICATOR,MSISDN
ADD,14089170001
ADD,14089170002
DEL,14089170004

Step 2: Upload the file

5. Log into the Alerts SFTP site using the credentials provided to you by Telesign.
6. Navigate to the "in" directory for your account. You must include the subOrg ID provided to you by Telesign in the path.

Example

/home/ts_products/phoneid_monitor/customer_data/243203/in/

7. Upload your new subscription file to this directory. The service checks for new files once per hour.

Step 3: Handle rejection or errors

8. If the service is unable to process the file, a rejection file is generated and uploaded to the SFTP site in the "out" directory for your account. The file includes content explaining the reason for the rejection.
9. If the file is not rejected, the service then processes each record one at a time. If the service fails to process any records, it generates an error file with details for each failed subscription attempt and uploads it to the "out" directory for your account on the SFTP site.

📘

NOTE:

You can match error and rejection files back to your subscription file based on the timestamp in the filenames.

10. For each ADD record in your subscription file that is successfully processed, the phone number from the record is added to the monitoring DB, and the service includes events for it in your next alert file.
11. For each DEL record in your subscription file that is successfully processed, the phone number from the record is removed from the monitoring DB. This can take longer to process than subscribing a new record. Once the unsubscribe is processed, events for this number are no longer tracked and no longer included in your alert files.

🚧

CAUTION:

It can take up to 90-days from the time the service receives an unsubscribe request for a phone number for that operation to be processed. So you may still receive alerts for that number in the meantime.