Using SMS Relentless
To use SMS Relentless just click on its icon on the upper bar, inspect the Telnyx/Plivo/Twilio available balance by selecting the name of the provider from the Balance drop-down list, then click on the refresh button on the Set ID line to refresh the list of available sender IDs, then choose one of the phone numbers or alphanumeric IDs from the drop-down list, then enter the phone number of the receiver preceded by the country code in the phone number field (Eg.:491212121212, where 49 is the country calling code), then enter the text of the message in the message text area, then press the ‘Send SMS’ button.
You can send the same message to multiple receivers by writing their phone numbers in thenumber field one after the other separated by coma, or if you have a large number of receivers, like hundreds or thousands, you can upload a txt or csv file by checking the ‘Upload file with phone numbers’ checkbox. In this case you should also specify the time interval in milliseconds between two consecutive message sending requests. You will find information about different restrictions regarding the message sending rate in the info note located above the ‘Upload the file’ button.
If your message contains special characters that don’t exist in the GSM 7-bit default alphabet table, it will be automatically encoded using the UCS-2 character encoding (similar to Unicode).
You can see the received messages by clicking the ‘Received Messages’ button and the sentmessages by clicking the ‘Sent Messages’ button. Both tables have a row of filters at the top,that you can use to filter the messages by the content of one or multiple columns. The row offilters shows up when you click on the arrow from the top left corner of the application content area. You can also permanently delete messages by selecting them and then clicking on the ‘Permanently delete’ icon located at the left end of the filters row.
If you click on the small icon located beneath each message in the ‘Received/Sent Messages’tables, a pop-up window will display all the messages exchanged between the sending and receiving phone numbers. This window allows sending a quick reply since the ‘From’ and the ‘To’ numbers are selected automatically:
The ‘Conversations’ button located on the left panel, displays all the messages exchanged between pairs of numbers by organizing them into conversations, which can be viewed, tagged and archived. Descriptions and flags can be also associated with each conversation:
The ‘Grouped by Number’ button on the left panel lists messages grouped by phone number, so that you can have a panoramic view of all the phone numbers that sent/received messages, and of all the messages sent/received from/on each phone number. A filter located at the top of the table allows listing only the messages for a specific phone number:
As an admin, you can also remove old messages to keep the database small, by checking the ' Remove old messages’ checkbox located below the ‘Grouped by Number’ button, on the left panel. You can remove all the messages that are older than the number of days specified in the appropriate fields. This can be done for both sent and received messages. If you delete old messages in this way, they won't be lost, because before deleting them, the application saves the messages in CSV files stored in the SMS_Relentless/removed_received_messages, and SMS_Relentless/removed_sent_messages folders. The CSV files have names that include the date of the message removal. If they try to remove old messages, users who are not in the admin group will see a pop-up message informing them that only admins can remove old messages.
If you have an MMS-enabled phone number, you can send up to 10 files of various formats, including jpeg, png, and gif, as MMS messages. After you check the ‘Select file(s) to send as MMS' checkbox, an info note will display all the necessary information about the file format and size restrictions applicable to the provider whose phone number you selected in the ‘Set drop-down list.
Since the deliverability of MMS messages depends on the carrier and device of the receiver and carriers can reject MMS messages with files exceeding a certain size, it's recommended to avoid sending large files or with uncommon formats. The best deliverability is achieved when sending jpeg/jpg, png, or gif files, with a total message size of 600 KB or less.
The files included in incoming MMS messages are not downloaded automatically. They are stored as URL links to the actual files and the receivers can download them only if they trust the senders and the domains of the URLs.
