Group messaging needs a member opt-out and anti-abuse controls
The requirementstatement
A group-messaging programme must let any member leave at any time, carry anti-abuse controls proportionate to the distribution size, and prevent recursive group messaging.
- Severityseverity
- HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- campaign.message_flow + campaign.description
- Where it liveslayer
- OperationalOPERATIONAL
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · formAI_FORM
- A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD
- A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
- Who requires itauthorities
- CTIA
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
In a group thread the sender is not the only person who can reach the recipient, so the ordinary opt-out is not enough — a member who leaves can be added back by anyone else in the group, and a recursive group can amplify one message into thousands. The three controls exist together because each one alone is defeated by the other two failure modes.
How to fix itremediation
Describe how a member leaves and stays left, what limits the size and rate of a distribution, and what stops a group creating another group. Done when the flow answers all three without the reader inferring any of them.
A compliant exampleexample
Any participant can reply STOP to leave a thread and cannot be re-added without opting in again; threads are capped at 25 participants, and participants cannot create new threads through the service.
Notesnotes
Applies only to group or multi-recipient threading, which the registration has no attribute for. The condition is carried in the criteria — the judge PASSes immediately where the campaign describes ordinary one-to-one messaging — and this note records that the applicability model could not express it.
Rules you will hit next
Other operational rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
OPS-034A programme in another language still owes the English keywordHighHIGHOPS-035The mandatory keywords must work over MMS tooHighHIGHOPS-044Suppression is brand-wide, not per numberHighHIGHOPS-047A state may give you less time than the federal limitHighHIGHOPS-052Silence after a scope question revokes everythingHighHIGHOPS-053A STOP answering a scope question must not be answered with anotherHighHIGH
OPS-071 is one of 139 operational rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.