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Comment by gregorymichael | Hacker News Reader

Hey Chris, Greg from Twilio here. I'm so sorry for the frustration, lack of communication, and high friction to get this resolved. Want to drop me an email at gb@twilio.com and we'll see if we can get it sorted out?

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Greg, it would be very useful if you could recommend a setup which would allow forwarding sms to employee numbers without the risk of account suspension.

Many of us use twilio and an account suspension is an undesirable scenario.

“Forward unless spam/problematic” would be very nice.

I just talked to Greg, he said something that might help would be to add "FWD: " before the forwarded message. Or possibly "Forwarded from XXX.XXX.XXXX: "

I can confirm that my system did forward the message without any modifications at all. (my employee knew what it was because he knows all text messages from that number are forwards)

This sounds like a highly problematic solution. If twilio actually greenlights spam that starts with "Forwarded from XXX.XXX.XXXX:" as Greg suggests, you can be sure actual spammers reading this thread will catch on and start sending spam texts with a header intro like that, probably by EOD today.

I think one of the key contexts here is being forgotten:

These are all internal messages. Someone cannot use our system to text random people. It's literally one person seeing them. We're a local service company. We're not SAAS or something like that. It's just people messaging us "Hey can you guys come Thursday?"

This would be like if you signed up for a VOIP provider for your business phones and they suspended your account because someone sent you a phishing text message.

With due respect, you are the one ignoring key context:

From the employee's carrier perspective those are external messages originating from you.

All that Verizon/T-Mobile/at&t see is spam coming from you, they don't know about the employer/employee relation. So when those carries complain to your carrier, your carrier has little options but to lock you.

Ok so are you saying that Twilio cannot be used to rely messages from company phone numbers to employee cells phones?

I would understand if this was an edge case, but my understanding is this is a quite common and a core use case. I'm pretty sure this exact use case is in their basic tutorial.

All the recipient's carrier knows is they see a spam or phishing message originating from Twilio, and (profess to) have a zero tolerance for spam/phishing. They have no idea about context of the "forward to consenting employee" use case or any way of validating it.

If there is any possibility that those messages could be interpreted as spam, that doesn't seem to be a valid use case for Twilio (any more). You could forward the message over some channel other than SMS to the employee (like email, or a custom solution).

I think you are right that it's not a valid use case anymore, even if they still assert that it is, because the reality is that it caused this problem. Even if they had responded to me immediately, my phones would have been shut down overnight.

Also, I was looking into the pricing a few months ago and its kind of expensive because I'm actually paying for two text messages: One for the incoming one, and one for the forwarded one.

The code has been working this way since maybe 2015, possibly before (its been so long, I can't remember). I've been using Twilio since I think 2010. I started out just doing call forwarding and later on added text messaging when customers started to expect to be able to text message us.

At the time, it was a core use case. There was a tutorial and everything "Forward text messages to your phone in a few lines of code".

The fact that this particular customer was only able to get a "friendly" human resolution for this by first posting about his problem on a tech-heavy social media platform like HN speaks very poorly about your company's customer service. I know that the giants like Google, Facebook et al shit all over their users now that they're large, but it would be nice to believe that it hasn't turned into a fad even among smaller companies doing it against their fully paying clients. Shameful.

Even employees of those companies can't get help when they need it. I've seen a case where an employee's account was incorrectly banned (or well that was their assumption) and they still couldn't get through to any of the teams.

It's getting pretty rediculous

I read something about how Amazon was accidentally firing people in their warehouses due to an automated system. And the HR people in the warehouse didn't have the power to override it.

An offer to help is always appreciated.

But seriously, it can't take a thread on HN to get a way to get support for a paying customer. There needs to be an 800 number they can call which is staffed with humans empowered to fix problems.

While I have no connection to this thread, I am also using Twilio in production and finding out here that if we ever have a problem there will be nobody answering the phone makes me reconsider what we should be doing to keep our business uptime.

hopefully you can find a way to solve this. Sounds like all somebody needs to take a business offline is the knowledge that they are using twillo (easy) and that they're forwarding texts to employees.

Ok I just e-mailed you, thanks so much

When a company has gotten so automated that the only way to get a solution is to beg and plead for help about it on social media, it's too automated.

I agree.

Although this particular thing may have happened because they got backed into a corner by the carriers. They might have been forced to scramble and suspend a bunch of accounts in order to protect themselves from being suspended. It's possible this might not have been a gambit to save money, but something they were almost forced to do without time to properly prepare. I'm just speculating, guessing.

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