Receiving SMS replies

To receive replies to messages that you send using your own SMS senders, you need to download our app with the add-on for receiving messages. Currently, the only way to receive SMS from your own senders is through webhooks.

The easiest way to see the SMS that were sent as a reply to your messages is our SMS console, where you can see all the SMS that you have sent to your customers, and their replies, and send even have an SMS conversation with them, just like using a chat application.

However, if you would like to handle SMS replies yourself, e.g. do some automated actions when you receive it, or send a notification to yourself, you can provide a webhook (callback url) that we will send you an HTTP POST request to, when your customer has replied to your SMS.

To start receiving requests for incoming messages, head out to our API console, and under Webhook settings, fill out your endpoint URL, and fill out or generate a secret that we will send you in our request body, so you can verify that the requests are coming from us.

To handle our HTTP POST request, you can use any web application framework, such as Laravel, Django, Express.js, Spring or ASP.NET.

Here is the example of the endpoint definition for Express.js:

const express = require("express");
const app = express()
app.use(express.json())

app.post("/webhook-endpoint", (req, res) => {
    if (req.body.secret != "YOUR_WEBHOOK_SECRET")
        return res.status(401).json({ ok: false });
    
    const { phone_number, text } = req.body;
    console.log(phone_number + " " + text);
    res.status(200).json({ ok: true });
})

app.listen(80);

The request consists of a JSON body with 3 fields:

• phone_number, the sender phone number

• text, the message body

• secret, it should be the same as the secret that you have provided in the API console

If your webhook does not return status 200, we will assume that the request was not successful, and we will notify you about it via e-mail. You can also just click the Test webhook button on our API console, to receive a test message to your webhook, and see if it works.