SMS and notifications

SMS goes out through your own provider account — Twilio, Vonage, or any gateway that takes a POST, which is most of the Malaysian ones. doTask does not resell messages: you keep your rate, your sender ID and your relationship with the carrier. Settings → SMS takes the account, the sender and the key; the key is stored encrypted by the sending service and never read back, so the page can only say that one is stored.

What you are billed for is segments, not messages. A plain message is 160 characters; one emoji or one curly quote turns the whole thing into UCS-2 at 70 characters a segment, so a “short” message quietly becomes three. The composer counts it in front of you as you type, which is the only place that number is any use.

Consent, which carriers enforce harder than the law does. Your “way out” line is appended to any message that does not already carry it. A customer who replies STOP — or BERHENTI — is opted out the moment it arrives and is left out of every send after, checked again person by person at the moment of sending, not only when the list was built. START puts them back. doTask never auto-replies to an SMS: a bot answering “STOP” is exactly what they asked not to receive. Point your provider’s inbound webhook at the URL on the Settings → SMS page and replies land in your inbox like any other message.

Notifications are the free half. A customer can turn them on from your chat page or the customer portal, and then a broadcast reaches them with the tab closed — no number, no per-message cost. It works where the browser supports web push, which is every desktop browser and Android; on iPhone the page has to be added to the home screen first. Send one from Broadcasts → New → Notification.

Both channels use the same audiences, the same schedule and the same results page as email, so what you learn about one list applies to all three.