Product changelog and announcements

A new Deactivations API for US Messaging is now available. This API returns you a file that contains phone numbers that have been removed from the US Carriers on the specified date. This allows you to automatically keep your subscriber lists clean by removing deactivated phone numbers from your campaigns.

For more information, please take a look at our Handling Deactivated Phone Numbers FAQ and our Deactivations API Documentation.

Starting October 14, Deleting a Message log will also automatically remove any Media objects associated with that message. This allows a more intuitive experience when customers issue delete requests on messages containing media. The change will apply to all messaging channels supporting media including MMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

More details of the changes to coming message records and media availability are published here.

Twilio Conversations (Chat and SMS channels), Programmable Chat, and Twilio Sync can now be used to develop compliant healthcare applications that contain protected health information (PHI) for organizations that are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Twilio will sign Business Associate Addendums (BAA) with covered entities and business associates for HIPAA Eligible Products and Services.

Learn more about how to build on Twilio for HIPAA compliance.

All Messaging Insights reports now contain 120 days of data. This data becomes visible upon choosing 120 days in the Date-Time picker dropdown within Messaging Insights available via the Programmable Messaging console.

This is an enhancement from the 30 days of data that we launched into General Availability in June and was one of the top three requests from early customers.

This release includes support for the expansion of Twilio’s Global Infrastructure via Edge Locations which allows connectivity control into and out of Twilio’s platform. These changes will provide an improved experience bringing Twilio’s public and private connectivity closer to your application.

Note: All these changes are backward compatible and will not impact existing configurations.

Programmable Messaging supports Edge Locations for connections to Twilio’s infrastructure via the Base URL in Twilio's API api.{edge}.us1.twilio.com.

.We are excited to announce the General Availability of Messaging Insights for all customers in console. Messaging Insights offers unprecedented transparency for customers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize message deliverability and engagement on Twilio.

The GA launch enables multidimensional filters, a Message List view and the following four reports.

1. Overview: high-level view of your outgoing and incoming messages
2. Delivery & Errors: deep dive into factors that affect deliverability to help you identify what is causing an issue
3. Responses: visualize and filter the inbound messages that you’re receiving back from your end users
4. OTP Conversion: aggregate and visualizes the information that you have sent to Twilio about successful OTP messages

Messaging Insights is available on the Twilio console for all customers. To learn more see the Messaging Insights docs.

Starting October 14, 2020 you will be able to view message logs in Console--and retrieve the resources via GET to the /Messages endpoint--for thirteen months after the resource is created. This represents a significant change as these logs are currently permanently stored by Twilio and retrievable via Console and API.

Before this change goes into effect we will provide a Bulk Export utility in Console and via API. Bulk Export will generate S3 files containing one day of data per file and deliver the download link via webhook, email, or Console. Records older than thirteen months will only be able to be retrieved via Bulk Export.

If you view logs in Console there is no follow up action, but just be aware that messages will now only display logs for 13 months.

If you perform log extraction via API on a rolling basis, it is important to verify that you are pulling the logs at a frequency that will remain unaffected by this change.

You can now send and receive contact cards, also known as VCards or VCF (Virtual Contact Files), via WhatsApp! Contact cards let people easily share and add new contacts to their phone book.

When a user receives and taps on a vCard in WhatsApp, the app will render a preview and allow them to easily call or add the contact to their phone book.

In WhatsApp, VCards are useful for businesses that send links to users, but have not yet been able to become an Official Business Account. For these businesses, links will only be clickable when the business has been added as a contact.

To send a vCard, simply send it as a file as you would with any other media.

A common request is to download large volumes of messaging data. Although this is possible using Twilio’s REST APIs, it can be slow. BulkExport allows you to download all of a day’s messages in a single file, rather than iterating on the list.

Now Enterprise Plan customers can request a date range, or enable automatic daily generation of files. Each file holds a day’s worth of messages exported in JSON. This enables customers who want to manage compliance or load into a warehouse to get a single file to feed to their processes. After Public Beta, this will be available to all Twilio accounts.

For more information on how to set this up, look at the BulkExport API Overview. Then you can start by requesting a day in the past, and getting all those messages in a single file.

You can now view WhatsApp template rejection reasons in console. When WhatsApp rejects a submitted template, they provide a reason:

• PROMOTIONAL: WhatsApp has deemed this to contain promotional or marketing content.
• TAG_CONTENT_MISMATCH: The language and/or template category selected don't match the template content.
• INVALID_FORMAT: Placeholders or other elementse formatted incorrectly.

Previously, this information was only available by opening a support ticket. For additional details on template rejection reasons from WhatsApp, please refer to our Guidance on Templates.

Happy building!