What is Sender ID
Basically Sender ID is the answer to the question “Who sent me this SMS?”.
When you recieve a SMS you will see who that SMS is from. If that SMS comes from another mobile phone you will see the senders mobile phone number.
When you use a service to send SMS such as eMarketeer the sender information will be a text such as your company name.
Create you own Sender ID
Want your company name to be displayed as sender?
We will help you do this.
- Fill out This Form with the Sender ID you’d want to use.
- It needs to be between 3 and 11 characters long, only (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) characters are allowed, and it cannot start with a number or be a phone number.
- Your request will be processed manually. If we receive your request during office hours it is usually ready the same day unless we need you to provide additional information.
Why do I need to apply for a Sender ID?
The ability to customize a Sender ID of an SMS can result in abuse by using it as a tool for spamming and spoofing. Spoofing is when a person or company masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate identity.
For example, someone can spoof another person by setting the Sender ID to the number of another person. This could be used as a tool to defraud or harass, such as like luring children to a specific location or writing something malicious and have it appear to come from a particular person.
To reduce the abuse and ensure the legitimate use of this feature to protect our customers, while still providing our customers with the ability to customize the Sender ID, each customized Sender ID must be registered and authenticated before use.
Limitations
Still most Belgian, US and Mexican mobile operators does not support aplha numerical sender information. If you send a SMS to a recipient under one of these mobile operators, your Sender ID will be replaced with a (random looking) number. This also applies to some other features such as multi-part sms and unicode. See the Whitelist of countries supporting SMS Sender ID for more informatino and a full country list.
It is also important to know that our SMS Service provider (46elks) can’t always guarantee that the SMS Sender ID will be displayed.
46elks do disable the feature on their end for certain routes and so does their upstream supplier, this is due to the fact that mobile operators tend to filter text messages, which result in non delivery and the number one priority is message delivery and not the features that go along with it. There are loads of mobile operators that that do not allow SMS aggregators to use the sender I.D feature. What we would recommend in a case where the mobile users must know who the message is from, you can specify your company, product name or system name in the first line of the message, as most handsets nowadays lets you see the fist few characters of the text message before you open it.