It is better to give than to receive — the seemingly universal proverb does not apply to your personal data. In the information era of the internet, fueled by how much information companies can acquire about their customers, giving them the ability to regulate unintentional data leaks in digital communications can be a gift that both delights your customers and gains their trust. In this post, you will learn how to redact sensitive or personal information unintentionally sent through Twilio-powered SMS conversations using Pangea’s Redact service.

By the end of the tutorial you’ll have:

• Set up a free Pangea account and Access Token for interacting with the Redact Service
• Set up a Django and Python application that utilizes the Twilio SMS and Pangea SDKs to redact sensitive information
• Run the application locally on your workstation
• Configured Twilio webhooks to invoke your app using ngrok

If you’d like to try …

In so many countries, when you think of December, you think of Christmas. And, for as long as I can remember, Christmas has always been about giving, not receiving.

When you think about giving, is your first thought of gifts and presents? For many, that would be true. But what about, instead of giving gifts, you give to those helping others in need instead?

Sure, it's nice to receive presents. But, as studies regularly show, if your focus is only on things, on the material, you'll likely end up depressed and anxious, not blissfully happy as the ads suggest.

So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to build an application to help anyone quickly donate to any number of charities and nonprofits.

For the sake of simplicity, I've compiled a small list of six charities that I feel are doing great work, and which …

Email is one of the most used communication channels. Whether for internal or external collaboration, email is fast, simple, and reliable. However, despite its business criticality, it was not designed with security in mind.

That makes email security a must in order to protect its vital information flow. This involves various methods and procedures for protecting email accounts, content, and communications from unauthorized access, loss, or compromise.

In this post, we’ll discuss common email security risks, as well as our security recommendations so you can get the most out of it.

Common Email Security Risks

The design of email made it as accessible and open as possible to facilitate communication. However, its design has made it the number one attack vector and a popular tool for cybercriminals to conduct phishing campaigns, target users and organizations to trick them into disclosing sensitive information, or use as a vehicle to spread malware, …

If you're reading this article, you've probably heard about all the exciting things, products, and services you can build with a Twilio number. You can send and receive SMS, receive calls, design an Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and code any telecom scenario you can think of in your favorite language. And it all starts with a Twilio phone number.

But, unfortunately, it is sometimes not so easy to purchase a number. We developers are often unaware that national regulations determine who is allowed to acquire a telephone number and under what conditions.

Many legislators prefer this approach because it helps prevent abuse and spam. However, it can be a challenge for us, as some legislators are stricter, while others are more relaxed, allowing easier access …

At Twilio, I maintain a blog dashboard that allows my colleagues and I to perform analysis on traffic, conversions, and other metrics for articles published on this blog. I have written in the past about some of the database benchmarking techniques I’ve implemented for this project, and this generated interesting discussions on Hacker News. Today I will be discussing a topic that is a lot less controversial.

The charts and reports generated by this dashboard combine data from several sources that include web traffic, blog article metadata, and user information. The latter comes from a large internal company database hosted in a Presto cluster.

Presto is an open-source distributed query engine for big data created by Facebook. It allows users to query many different data sources, such as Hadoop, Kafka, MySQL, MongoDB, and many more using its own SQL implementation. This effectively abstracts the developer from query language differences among …

ElastiCache, also known as Amazon ElastiCache, is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform that provides an in-memory data store and cache service with compatibility support for Redis and Memcache. ElastiCache was built to inject speed into web applications by replacing disk-based data retrieval with a much faster in-memory alternative.

The whole purpose of caching data is to reduce server latency. To achieve this, an in-memory key-value pair is a great option due to its fast data retrieval. Let's imagine you are building an app that performs complex queries (such as multiple joins) to the database and some additional calculations on the server.

Unless the data is cached, the response from the server might be slow because of the multiple-join queries to a disk-based database, and the additional computation is done on the server. But, if the data is cached on the first retrieval (that is, fetching from the database …

This is part 3 of the series of how to set up a working MySQL database to send SMS. Part 2 can be found under the tutorial requirements.

In this article, you will learn how to send an SMS with contents from a MySQL database.

Tutorial requirements

• Refer to this Twilio article to set up a MySQL database in Java Spring Boot.
• IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition for convenient and fast Java project development work. The community edition is sufficient for this tutorial.
• Java Development Kit (JDK) version 11.
• ngrok, also known as a handy utility to connect the development version of the Java application running on your system to a public URL that Twilio can connect to.
• MySQL is the database service you’ll use to store the employee data and access in your application through REST APIs. You can follow the guide for detailed steps to setup MySQL …

Twilio’s Conversations API is described as “A single API for seamless conversational messaging”. That sounds really cool, but what kind of things can you actually build with the Conversations API?

For starters, the Conversations API is a foundational component in Twilio’s offering and our industry leading software applications, Twilio Flex, and Twilio Frontline, are built on top of the Conversations API.

But the Conversations API can also be used to power your own multi-party or multi-channel applications. In this blog post, I will walk through configuring and deploying a digital channel Support and Messaging Application powered by Twilio Conversations.

Applications Architecture

Before we start building, let me show you the end result. Here …