Product changelog and announcements

.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!

You can now send and receive media messages that are up to 16MB in size on Twilio API for WhatsApp, an increase from a previous size limit of 5MB.

The Twilio API for WhatsApp supports sending and receiving images, audio, PDF files, and video. The following formats are currently supported:

• Images: JPG, JPEG, PNG
• Audio: MP3, OGG, AMR
• Documents: PDF
• Video: MP4

Please refer to our Guidance on WhatsApp Media Messages for additional details on media messages on Twilio API for WhatsApp.

Happy building!

Twilio is now fully live with Verizon 10DLC A2P's service and carrier fees are in effect. You can read more about the change in our FAQ here.

Starting today, read message status and location message are available to all developers building on the Twilio API for Whatsapp.

• Read message status: When an outbound WhatsApp message is opened by the end user, this will generate a status callback indicating the message was read. Read status will also be shown in the message logs and the Message Resource API. See our documentation for more details.
• Location message: You can now send location messages over Whatsapp, by including the PersistentAction parameter in your API requests. Location message is currently only supported in Session Messages. See our documentation for more details.

Check out our blog post on using these new features to build deeper customer engagement experience via messaging.

In order to keep you in carrier compliance and ensure fair service across all customers, we now have rate limits in place for MMS service. While you can still send messages to Twilio at a rapid rate, the delivery rate for each account is now capped at 25 messages per second (MPS) and for each Twilio long code at 1 MPS.

For time-sensitive messages, we recommend that you keep a close eye on the queue length via Message Queue Insights in the console. You can also find more details on this page.

Advanced Opt-Out gives customers granular control over the end-to-end compliance experience for their customers and users. Customers can now customize opt-in, opt-out, help keywords, and confirmation messages on a global basis with per-country or per-language overrides all within the console.