DATA247 BUSINESS TEXTING SERVICES

Standard Return Fields:
Phone - The phone number queried
Wless - Either "y" for wireless or "n" for non-wireless
Carrier_name - carrier name of provided number
Carrier_id - Carrier id of carrier
SMS_address - SMS gateway address of number
MMS_address - MMS gateway address of number

Optional Return Fields:
Billable - Indicates whether customer was charged for this query
Cost - Cost of this query
Type - Either "M" for mobile phone, "L" for landline, or "V" for VOIP
GIT - Voicemail greeting interrupt Tone
OCN - The operating company number
Timezone - The timezone in the area specified by the phone number's NPA
Tz_offset - The offset from UTC time in the area specified by the number's NPA
IANA - IANA timezone of the area specified by the number's NPA
Last_port_date - The date the phone was last ported to a new carrier
DBA - Standard name for carrier
MNO - Mobile Network Operator
City - City where NPA/NXX is located
State - State where NPA/NXX is located
Country - Country where NPA/NXX is located
Zip - Zip code where NPA/NXX is located

$0.005 per look-up*

*$12 monthly membership fee
*Volume discounts available

USA/Canada

Once you sign up, you have three options to access our Text@ service:

• You can type-in the phone numbers one-by-one via your account on our website.
• You can upload the phone numbers to us in an Excel (.xlsx) or .csv file.
• You can use our API to integrate our service into your software application.

Data247 also offers a browser extension for Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox which automatically highlights phone numbers on web pages and allows you to look up information about them with a single click.

No, we provide you with the SMS and MMS Gateway email addresses so that you can send the messages yourself.

The maximum SMS length is 160 characters. MMS messages can be much larger.

While most people realize they can send text messages via a carrier's email gateway, most don't realize that they can send multimedia messages as well. Many carriers have two separate email domains; one for SMS and one for MMS. Others use the same email domain for both.

Sending MMS has several advantages. First, the character-count limits which exist for SMS messages (which vary by carrier) don't exist for mms messages. Second, you can attach pictures or sound files to your email messages (the same way you'd attach them when sending to regular email addresses), and your customers will be able to receive them along with your text message.

Note that different carriers have different requirements for pictures, and if a picture doesn't meet the criteria, it won't get displayed. We've found that making your jpg file as small as possible is important (Linux users: convert -quality 2 inputfile outputfile). Also, we've found that 320x240 pixels seems to work well for most carriers.

Text messages sent to wireless phones via email (SMTP) are covered by the Can-Spam act of 2003. This act prohibits sending unwanted commercial email messages to wireless devices without prior permission. The second link below offers a really great explanation, including a good description of what constitutes a commercial message:

Stop Unwanted Robocalls and Texts
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business

The free services (and many of the pay services as well) don't take number portability into account. As a result, when a subscriber for carrier A decides to change to carrier B and keep their same number, most services won't know about the change. For USA numbers, our services will be aware of the carrier change almost instantly.

We've found that when people aren't receiving text messages, it's usually because the phone carriers are blocking them. Unfortunately, each carrier has it's own set of criteria for determining which messages are SPAM and which are not. But usually it's because of one of the following:

1. Message content - it's possible that certain words in the message are raising flags, and are making the carrier mark the message as SPAM.

2. Messages sent per hour - If a large number of messages are being sent out at once, this could also raise red flags. If you have a lot of messages to be delivered which are not time-sensitive, it's best to throttle the sending of them as much as possible.

3. IP address - Sometimes the IP address that is sending the message can be blocked by some carriers. For Data247's Text@ service, the IP address doesn't matter because you're sending the message via email.

4. Email address - Carriers may block an email address, or an entire web domain if they believe SPAM messages are coming from them. If you're using a business email account (as opposed to a free Yahoo or Gmail account), there are things you can do to increase your email's reputation. Here's a link to an article which may be helpful for this:

How to improve domain reputation for better email deliverability

If you are using a free email account, you may want to try using a different one, or switching to a business email account and following the suggestions in the above article.

No, we don't offer any guarantee. But, we get the carrier-lookup information from the carriers, so the carrier data should be extremely accurate and up-to-date.

As for the SMS and MMS Gateway Addresses, we do our best to keep these up to date. However, there are some carriers we do not have the information for. In fact, a few of the smaller carriers don't even offer email-to-SMS/MMS Gateway Addresses.

Click here to download a list of carrier ID's for USA/Canada.