SMS - Get started

This page explains the basic usage of Telesign SMS and directs you to instructions for sending your first request.

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What is Telesign SMS?

Telesign SMS allows you to send personalized messages through SMS directly from websites or mobile applications. Telesign SMS allows you to:

• Send a personalized SMS alert to a user's phone number.
• Send a timely reminder to a user's phone number.
• Send a personalized notification to a user's phone number.

General requirements

• Resource: https://rest-ww.telesign.com/v1/messaging
• Authentication: Basic (easiest to implement) or Digest
• Encoding: Accepts only UTF-8 unicode characters as inputs.
• Accepts: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
• Required Headers: Content-Type - application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Basic usage

1. Send a request to the SMS resource of the Engage API that includes:
   • The message text
   • The recipient phone number
   • A Telesign abbreviation for the message type.
2. Save the reference ID included in the HTTP response, if the request was successful.
3. Send this reference ID in a request to the Transaction Status resource of the Engage API to see the delivery status of your message.

Try it

• For everyone: For instructions on how to send your first SMS without code, see SMS - Try it without code.
• For developers: For instructions on how to send your first SMS with code, choose one of our SMS tutorials in your preferred programming language.

Example

POST https://rest-ww.telesign.com/v1/messaging HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic 12345678-9ABC-DEF0-1234-56789ABCDEF0:Uak4fcLTTH/Tv8c/Q6QMwl5t4ck=
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
phone_number=15551212&message=Your message here.&message_type=MKT

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
{
   "reference_id": "0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF",
   "status": {
      "code": 290,
      "updated_on": "2017-31-03T14:51:28.709526Z",
      "description": "Message in progress"
   }
}

Compliance

For SMS compliance best practices, please refer to the articles in the Compliance section in our Support Center.