STOP and opt-out
A text message that reads as an opt-out is treated as a directive before it is treated as correspondence. Connect writes a suppression against that person, records the decision in the audit trail, and refuses outbound contact from that moment — not at the end of a batch and not after a review. This half of SMS works today, even though sending on the live carrier does not.
What counts as a stop request#
The recognised words are the conventional ones a person expects to work without being told: STOP, and the opt-out vocabulary that accompanies it in ordinary use. Matching ignores case and surrounding punctuation, because somebody typing a full stop after it at eleven at night is not filling in a form and should not have to.
What is deliberately not attempted is sentiment. A long message expressing irritation is not silently converted into a permanent block by a model's reading of tone — that would make an unpredictable, unauditable rule out of a legal one. Someone who wants a business to stop writing and does not use an opt-out word is handled the way any other request is: a person sees it in Needs You and decides, and the decision is recorded as theirs.
What is written, and where it lives#
- A suppression against the person
- The refusal itself, checked before any outbound message is prepared rather than after one is drafted.
- A memory row tagged
block:sms - The durable directive. It lives in the tag list rather than the body, because
directives()reads only tags — text in the body would be advice the engine can overlook. - An audit entry
- What was decided, under which rule, and what followed. A refusal is a decision, so it is recorded like one.
- The message itself
- Kept on the conversation. The evidence for a suppression is the customer's own words, and deleting them would leave the block unexplained.
The tag is what makes the refusal portable. A block recorded as a property of one channel's settings is a block one channel honours; a tagged memory row against the contact is resolved on every future decision about that person, by the same memory tiers autonomy uses. That is why an opt-out here can be made to reach further than SMS — see SMS suppression for the difference between a channel-scoped block and a do-not-contact entry.
How quickly it takes effect#
The inbound message is scanned at ingest, before the agent loop sees it.
Result The suppression exists before any reasoning happens. There is no window in which a draft is written against someone who has just opted out.
Anything already queued for that person is re-checked against suppression at the send boundary.
Result A follow-up scheduled yesterday does not go out today. Suppression is evaluated when a send is attempted, not when it was planned.
The refusal is recorded with its reason.
Result The Decision Log shows a refusal rather than a silence, so nobody spends an afternoon wondering why a sequence stopped.
What this does not cover#
Honouring STOP does not make Connect an SMS sender. On the live carrier there is no outbound SMS at all, so the practical effect of a stop request today falls on the channels that can send — the person stops receiving email and WhatsApp under the same directive, provided the block is recorded at contact level rather than for sms alone.
Nor does it cover the paperwork a sender needs in India. Being able to honour an opt-out is not the same as being permitted to send: commercial SMS there additionally requires DLT registration with the telecom operators, which is a process rather than a setting.
Questions#
Does a stop request block every channel or only SMS?
It depends on the scope the directive is written at. A block:sms tag stops SMS; a block recorded against the contact with no channel qualifier stops everything. If somebody says stop by text and means stop entirely, widen the directive on the contact — the workflow is in A do-not-contact reaching every channel.
Can the Assistant clear a block?
No. The Assistant's rights are deliberately narrower than a person's, and clearing a do-not-contact entry is one of the things it may not do at all. A person with the right permission clears one, and the clearing is audited.
What does the customer receive back?
On the live carrier, nothing by SMS, because no SMS can be sent. With a provider that carries SMS, a confirmation is the conventional and often expected courtesy, and it is subject to the same registration rules as any other outbound message in India.