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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

If Twilio can detect that it's spam, surely the correct procedure would be to block it when it first comes into Twilio's system from outside, not blindly forwarding it to a customer's list and then blaming the customer for it!

Sorry, this is just bad design.

Re: > The customer may want to handle / filter the spam.

Then provide the customer with a "yes, send me all the spam" option.

Which do you suppose is the common case here?

1) Customer doesn't want spam.

2) Customer is doing a "study of spam"

3) Customer is running a spam filtering service.

Yeah, it's 1), dude, in a gigantic majority of the cases.

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False. The customer may want to handle / filter the spam. The customer may be do a study of spam. The customer may be offering their customers a spam blocking service.

Fine to provide an option to filter it perhaps, requiring twilio to block what it THINKS is spam is a recipe for disaster, spam filters are no where near perfect.

> requiring twilio to block what it THINKS is spam is a recipe for disaster

Yet they are disabling the entire account when they think it has sent spam.

They could at least provide an indication when delivering the spam that "Twilio believes this message is spam and will block your account if you try to resend it".

provide an option? send spam to some other bucket that the customer can view? label it so customer can filter it? warn them / block outbound spam (if it's not high qps I dont see a reason for the zero tolerance here, some kind of restricted mode is more reasonable). Communicate with the customer, especially when they contact you..

So many other options here

It's really clear that folks don't

a) understand the market twilio is trying to serve

b) been in this market.

This guy probably is not checking is error codes. Twilio will always give you 30007 in these cases.

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008704834-Er...

Almost certainly this guy failed to follow their messaging guidelines. If you send (or forward) spam that includes links to third party websites or URL shorteners THEY TELL YOU that may trigger spam / blocking behavior.

And yes, this needs to be a zero tolerance game - with spammers the reasonable limits turn into 100 accounts being setup by folks in india for someone for 20 cents an account.

There's a whole contingent of engineers that are afraid of giving options to customers, and another that's annoyed at not having options. It's weirdly divisive and we're seeing that play out here.

parent edited their comment.

At least in use cases I was dealing with - we wanted zero filtering of inbound SMS because it was used as a control interface.

Spam didn't matter to us. Spammers had no idea how to format their messages etc. We also whitelisted inbound numbers.

The Twilio use case is not primarily for "mailing lists" and third party sms forwarding stuff.

And for a while SMS worked very well in certain IoT's contexts (SMS used to basically have its own channel that had surprisingly good deliverability for some reason).

Internationally in particular voice and data used to be potentially wildly expensive.

For sat backhaul, you could get 10 to 25 cents a message. A voice minute would be like $5 - $10. So this is a 100x difference potentially. Even data minutes were like $1-5/minute way back. The connection setup and teardown times were lower with SMS then doing a voice channel call etc. Pricing looks a lot better now, but still, messages are cheap (or free).

https://www.satphonestore.com/airtime/iridium-airtime.html

How does twilio even know that you will only forward messages they have scanned for spam? It seems like they MUST put the spam filter on the outbound leg.

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