When a carrier hard-rejects a text to a number, Sure Send pauses SMS to that
number and shows a Resume SMS button on the contact so you can clear it once
the number checks out. The pause exists to protect your sending line: every
further attempt to a number the carrier has already refused counts against that
line’s reputation.
The pause was only being checked by the background send jobs. Four other ways of
sending a text reached the carrier directly and never asked, so they kept sending
to paused numbers.
What changes for you
Replying from the Inbox. A reply to a paused number used to go out and fail
quietly. It is now refused up front with a reason, so you can see what happened
and resume SMS on the contact if the number is fine.
Group texts. A group send with a paused participant used to keep retrying a
number the carrier had already refused. It is now refused with a message naming
who is paused, and pointing you at resuming SMS on their contact record. It does
not ask you to remove them from the thread — the pause is our carrier
heuristic, not their decision, and it can be a false positive.
Automated and AI-sent texts. Automation text steps, AI follow-ups and
missed-call text-backs now skip a paused number instead of attempting it.
If you integrate over the API
POST /partner/textMessages with send=true to a number whose SMS is paused now
returns 422 Unprocessable Entity with the pause as the reason. It previously
returned 201 Created and then failed to deliver. If you are integrating, this
is the line to check: a paused recipient is now a visible error at request time
rather than a silent non-delivery afterwards.
The AI SMS send endpoint refuses the same case with a 502, also carrying the
pause as the reason. Either way the send is refused at request time instead of
accepted and dropped, but the two status codes differ — worth knowing if you
branch on them.
What this doesn’t change
Resuming SMS still only clears a carrier-delivery pause on that one contact’s
copy of the number. A contact who replied STOP is opted out for legal reasons,
and none of this touches that — the two are separate systems on purpose.