How SMS and DLT works
Understanding this page is the difference between a first send that works and a week of rejected messages. It is short, and everything else in the manual assumes it.
Why registration exists at all
Until 2018, anyone could send commercial SMS from any sender name with any content. The result was unsolicited messaging and fraud at national scale, so TRAI, the Indian telecom regulator, mandated a system called DLT, Distributed Ledger Technology.
The idea is simple. Before you can send commercial SMS, you register three things: who you are, what name you send from, and what your messages say. At delivery time the operator checks the message against that registry, a step called scrubbing. Anything that does not match is dropped before it reaches a handset.
This is not a Splashify rule
Every legitimate SMS provider in India works this way, because the check happens at the operator, not at the provider. A provider who tells you registration is optional is describing a service that will silently fail.
What gets checked, and against what
All four must line up. Three out of four is a rejected message, and the rejection reason you get back is often vague about which one was wrong, which is why the panel checks what it can before spending a send.
The chain is the part people get wrong
Your messages do not travel directly from you to the operator. They pass through a registered telemarketer, and the chain you declare must name the telemarketer your messages actually go through.
For traffic sent through Splashify that is us. Our telemarketer ID is shown on the Chain page in your panel, with a copy button.
Not declaring it rejects every message
This is the single most common cause of a campaign that sends successfully from the panel and never arrives. The message is accepted, travels the route, and is dropped at the operator because the declared chain does not include us. See Chain declaration.
Message categories
Every template is registered under a category, and the category decides when the message may be sent and to whom. It also affects the price.
Choosing the category is not a labelling exercise. Registering a marketing message as service is a compliance breach that can cost you your sender ID, and operators do check.
See Sending rules and limits for what each category allows.
Where each piece is used
You send a message
Naming an approved template and the values for its variables.
We assemble and submit it
The template body with your values substituted in, sent from your registered sender ID, tagged with your entity and template IDs.
The operator scrubs it
Checking the entity, the chain, the sender ID and the content against the registry.
It is delivered, or dropped
Either way a delivery report comes back, and your message status is updated. See Delivery and status.