A state may black out whole days
The requirementstatement
Where a state enacts holiday blackout dates for solicitations, no solicitation may be sent on them.
- Severityseverity
- LowLOWBest practice. Worth fixing, rarely fatal on its own.
- When it bitesphase
- After you are livepostFalls due once you are sending: STOP handling, quiet hours, suppression, record retention.
- What is checkedobject
- send date against a state holiday calendar
- Where it liveslayer
- OperationalOPERATIONAL
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- External recordEXTERNAL_DATA
- The fact that settles it lives in a register we cannot query, such as the IRS file, a postal database, or another provider’s tenant. Reported as a warning with the evidence to check, not as a pass.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Wait on someone elseTERMINAL_EXTERNAL
- Needs an external system or a waiting period, such as IRS propagation, a vetting result, or a carrier queue.
- Who requires itauthorities
- state law (UT)
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
How to fix itremediation
Hold a blackout calendar alongside the window table and check the date as well as the time before scheduling. Done when a campaign scheduled across a blackout date skips the affected recipients rather than the whole send.
Check this yourselfattestation
No tool can settle this one for you. Here is the check, and what wrong looks like.
Do you hold a current state holiday blackout calendar, and when was it last reviewed?
- 1Subscribe to a compliance feed or review the statutes annually — this is the rule most likely to have changed since anybody last looked.
- 2Check the date as well as the time before scheduling, so a campaign crossing a blackout skips the affected recipients rather than the whole send.
What wrong looks like: A blackout is a day on which the send must not happen at all, so an hours-only scheduler runs the campaign into it. A programme built correctly two years ago becomes non-compliant with nothing about it changing.
Notesnotes
Rules you will hit next
Other operational rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
OPS-096 is one of 139 operational rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.