How is a multipart LONG SMS processed?

If your SMS message contains emoji, special or non-English symbols that count as extra characters, the message may be sent as multipart SMS (several messages). Majority of the users have modern devices and will receive them as one long SMS, depending on the handset they have.  Smartphones (iPhone & android) support incoming multipart (long) SMS and assemble them as 1 long message (SMS). Older feature phones may receive several separate messages.

1. A single SMS message consists of 160 characters, less the compliance required text "TextStop2End".  Total, 148 characters are available for each outgoing text message.

2. When you schedule your single or group SMS campaigns, and go over the 160 character limit, a prompt will be displayed.

3. If the message is over 160 characters, it will send as LONG SMS (multipart SMS or concatenated SMS). Then, each single SMS as part of the LONG SMS will have a limit of 140 characters.  This is due to additional information we need to pass to carriers, to let them we are sending multipart SMS.  This way, carriers will be able to assemble the text message as 1 long SMS.

In short, please follow the guideline:

👉 Your limit for outgoing SMS is 148 characters, we need to add required compliance language at end of message to provide instructions to optout. "TxtStop2End" takes 12 characters, 11 letters + 1 characters for new line.  This makes a total of 160 characters.

👉 Long SMS, segments, multipart text messages, limit per single message segment is 140 characters.

👉 If you use emoji or special characters, these symbols are treated differently and they will take more than 1 character.

👉 DO NOT COPY and PASTE from Word doc, as this may add some invisible or special characters that will increase the size of your message.  Use NOTEPAD to copy/paste plain text. The system will automatically replace the following special characters with plain characters (same characters, but not with the word doc formatting).  This way they will not count as more chars and increase the text message length:

” “ ‘ - — …

👉 All of the above is valid for USA messaging.  For international texting, the message length will be less, as different countries and carriers have different requirements.

👉 New line or empty line count as 1 character.

TIP: if you copy and paste the text from word document, it might transfer some invisible characters.  It's always better just to type in the message.