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Who are ToucanText?

ToucanText Limited is a market leading SMS text message solutions and service provider, offering extensive experience in the SMS aggregation sector. ToucanText was designed to be the most efficient and cost effective method for sending SMS messages, providing ToucanText customers with the very best platform and customer service available on the market.

Which countries and networks can I send to?

Using ToucanText’s outbound SMS service, you will be able to connect to over 1000 networks in 195 countries worldwide. This helps to make ToucanText one of the most well connected SMS providers in the world.

How to buy messages?

In order to top up your account with more SMS messages, simply log in to the ToucanText website using your account credentials. Here, you will be able to select the bundle you wish to purchase and complete the order by entering your debit or credit card details. Your messages will be automatically applied to your account and added to your existing message balance. Alternatively, you can provide a PO to your ToucanText account manager and/or our sales team and we will invoice you for your messages.

Do messages expire?

No. Just one of the many benefits of using ToucanText as your SMS service provider is the fact that none of the messages you purchase carry an expiry date. This means that once you’ve purchased a block of messages, these will remain on your account until they have been sent.

How can I tell if a message has been sent?

Through the use of delivery receipts (DLR) we let you know if a message has been delivered. We either forward DLRs to you, as part of a HTTP request to a URL of your choice, or you can call these messages using our GET Inbound Message function. With our HTTP request your server must respond with a an ‘OK’ status code to indicate successful processing of the delivery receipts. In addition to this, we also publish your delivery receipts as part of our SMS Online web application.

Receiving messages?

We currently offer a few options for receiving inbound messages. The first requirement is that you lease an inbound number from ToucanText. Once you have a number, you can begin to receive these as part of the following options:

  • The first available method is our ‘Get Inbound Message’ function. This mechanism works by retrieving the last inbound SMS message you received. Each message must be acknowledged before the next available message can be retrieved.
  • Alternatively, we can push messages to you. This method is known as our ‘PUSH Inbound’ messages and this requires the registration of a Web Push URL/address. When your inbound message arrives, ToucanText will automatically push the messages on to the handler script, which is hosted by you.
  • In addition to these options, we can also provide access to your Inbound messages as part of our web portal ‘SMS Online’ or forwarded as an SMTP Email Message.

Which product should I use?

Our customers use our products for a host of different reasons and ToucanText offers a number of solutions and options to help cater for your individual needs. Which solution is right for you truly depends on what you are looking to do and how you would prefer to send your SMS messages.

Some people prefer to login to a standalone portal to send their messages, similar to logging into Gmail to send an email. Other people spend most of their days in Outlook (or another email client) so would prefer to send an email to and have us convert that into an SMS e.g:

[mobile-number]@smtp.toucantext.com

Alternatively, you can build our SMS solution directly into your 3rd party applications or websites, allowing an application or website developer to seamlessly add this powerful communication method into your applications. Whichever way you prefer to send messages, ToucanText has the options available to suit all needs.

What is SMS Online?

SMS Online has been designed as a simple-to-use online messaging portal, giving users the ability to send individual messages to single recipients or bulk send to multiple contacts in a single broadcast. Some of the features include the ability to set up and store contacts in the form of address books, schedule messages to be sent out at a later date and even send flash SMS messages for high-priority messages that cannot be ignored. For more details on flash SMS, please see the relevant FAQ question.

What is the SMS API?

The SMS API provides access to our platform using a number of popular development platforms and languages. It has been designed to be simple and easy to use and we provide easy to use sample code for our C#, C# Async, cURL, HTTP, Java, VB.NET, VB.NET Async APIs.

Our .NET API is available for both the .NET Framework and .NET Core flavours allowing use with lightweight .NET Core applications. It also supports asynchronous calls with async/await for optimised threading.

What is Email to SMS Gateway

We understand that in business we typically spend a lot of time using Outlook (and other email clients) to correspond with our clients and colleagues. So what better way to get a message across than to send an SMS message from your mail client. Once your account has been set up to use our Email to SMS Gateway, simply send an email to us using the format provided below, we will convert it and deliver it to the recipients handset for you.

[mobile-number]@smtp.toucantext.com // i.e. 07987654321@smtp.toucantext.com

What is SMS Automation?

SMS Automation enables you to dynamically integrate ToucanText SMS services within applications, business systems and websites. The software can be used to monitor these systems, following your business rules/logic, and automate the distribution of text messages when certain triggers are initiated following an event or defined condition, or when particular schedules are set. Automation guarantees the timing, relevance, personalisation and performance of communications and can help cut costs, improve communication and reduce risk.

How many characters can I use in a single SMS message?

A single SMS message can be anything up to 160 characters in length and will consume one message credit. Special characters, such as full stops, commas, spaces and carriage returns, may consume one (or multiple) characters.

What happens if I go over 160 characters?

When you send an SMS message over 160 characters, the message will be split during transport. Large messages are subsequently segmented into 153 character segments and sent individually. They are then rebuilt by the recipient’s device, often referred to as a concatenated message. Each segment will consume a message credit.

Is there a maximum character limit for my SMS messages?

Yes, the maximum length of a text message is 918 characters in length. This equates to six separate segments and will therefore use six message credits.

Why would I use flash SMS?

Flash SMS is a type of SMS delivered by ToucanText to a recipient’s handset that appears directly on the main screen without user interaction and is not automatically stored in the inbox. Flash SMS is a value-added-service to standard SMS delivery, and is most commonly used to immediately catch your recipient’s attention. The most prominent use of flash SMS is for two-factor authentication (2FA) messages.

Why would I need an SMS queuing mechanism?

Users of ToucanText’s SMS Automation software benefit from an outbound buffer, or queuing mechanism, that is built into the product as standard. This is extremely beneficial if you are sending bulk SMS.

If your internet goes down for any reason, or you suffer a power outage, your messages aren’t lost they will just wait in a queue. Once the internet connection is reinstated the service will reconnect to the API and the messages will be sent immediately. If you’ve run out of credits, or if the text messages are incorrectly formatted, you can go into the queue and edit messages. You then simply add them back to the queue and resend.

This queuing mechanism also enables you to perform other tasks whilst the messages are sent, rather than having to wait for them to be distributed.

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