An SMS STOP, end to end
The opt-out word is recognised at ingest, before any reasoning. A suppression is written against the person, a memory row tagged block:sms records the directive durably, and the audit trail records the refusal as a decision. Everything after that is skipped on purpose: no draft, no approval queue, no sales judgement about whether the customer really meant it.
The chain#
- Trigger — a person decides they no longer want messages from the business.
- External event — they reply to the business number with an opt-out word, and the provider posts it like any other inbound message.
- Authentication and workspace resolution — the post is verified and the receiving number resolves to one workspace; a directive can only ever be written inside the workspace that received it.
- Ingest — the payload is normalised, and the body is scanned for an opt-out word before anything treats it as correspondence.
- Canonical record — the message is stored on the conversation. The customer's own words are the evidence for everything that follows, so they are kept rather than consumed.
- Classification — the message is classified as a directive, not as a question. This is where the flow branches away from the ordinary inbound path.
- Knowledge, memory and rules — a memory row against the contact, tagged
block:smsin the tag list.directives()reads only tags, which is what makes the block hold on every future decision instead of being advice buried in a body. - Autonomy and approval — none is sought. An opt-out is not a proposal a person approves; it is a refusal that takes effect immediately, and no autonomy mode can override it.
- Action — a suppression entry against the person, enforced at the send boundary every other outbound message passes through.
- Result — outbound contact for that person is refused from this moment. Anything already handed to a provider is already gone and cannot be recalled.
- Relationship, timeline and memory — the directive is visible on the contact with its origin, so the next person to open that record sees why nothing is going out.
- Audit, usage and Needs You — the refusal and its rule are recorded, because a refusal is a decision. Nothing is queued for approval; there is nothing to decide.
- Next — a confirmation is the conventional courtesy where a provider can carry one. On the live carrier no SMS can be sent, so the acknowledgement a customer would normally receive by text does not go out.
What is deliberately skipped#
| Skipped stage | Why | What would go wrong otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting a reply | There is nothing to answer | A generated reply to a stop request is the worst message this product could send |
| Approval in Needs You | Nobody approves an opt-out | A queue would delay a refusal that must be immediate |
| Sentiment judgement | Matching is literal | A model deciding whether somebody meant it makes an unauditable rule out of a legal one |
| Sales classification | A directive is not an objection | Treating withdrawal of consent as a stage in a pipeline is exactly the failure this path prevents |
| Retry | The write either happened or the request failed loudly | A silently retried block could produce duplicate entries with different origins |
What a person sees afterwards#
Open the contact.
Result The suppression is shown with its origin — an inbound opt-out, rather than something somebody added by hand.
Open the conversation.
Result The message that caused it is there in the customer's own words, which is what makes the entry reviewable months later.
Open the Decision Log.
Result The refusal appears as a decision with its rule. Later attempts to contact that person appear as refusals too, so a stalled sequence explains itself.
If the block should be wider than one channel — and a person who texts STOP often means every channel — widen it on the contact rather than adding a second entry per channel. A do-not-contact reaching every channel is that flow, and it is one memory row rather than five.
Questions#
Does an autonomous workspace behave differently here?
No. Autonomy governs what Connect may do without asking; it has no mode that permits contacting a suppressed person. The most autonomous configuration and the most cautious one honour a stop request identically.
What if the opt-out arrives while a campaign is running?
Anything not yet handed to a provider is refused at the send boundary when it is attempted, including steps scheduled earlier. Anything already handed over will be delivered — no messaging network offers a recall.
Can the customer undo their own stop request by texting again?
Writing again does not clear the entry by itself. Clearing one is a decision a person with permission takes and the audit trail records, precisely so that a block is not lifted by an ambiguous message.