Prospects who text STOP have SMS paused — website keeps working

Improvement

Week of May 19, 2026

Previously when a prospect texted STOP, the carrier blocked future SMS, but the STOP message itself was still relayed to the advocate — making it feel like the prospect was telling the advocate to stop, even if the advocate hadn’t messaged them in weeks. We now intercept these system keywords before they reach the advocate, and scope the pause to SMS only so the rest of the conversation still flows.

STOP keywords are intercepted — STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT (Twilio’s official list, matched case-insensitively against the whole message body). The message does not reach the advocate.
Only SMS is paused — the prospect can still see and reply to the advocate on the community website. Email (where configured) is also unaffected. STOP is a carrier-level SMS signal, not a global “go away.”
Advocates keep messaging normally — the conversation view doesn’t change. If the prospect stops responding, the advocate infers from silence; no banner is shown.
Admins see the trail — the conversation timeline records an admin-only beat (“Prospect opted out of SMS”) so admins can see what happened during support investigations.
START resumes — START, YES, or UNSTOP from the prospect clears the pause, and an admin-only “Prospect opted back in to SMS” beat is recorded.
Outbound SMS is guarded — the SMS notification consumer skips delivery cleanly when the prospect is opted out, and SendSmsMessage keeps a backstop validation. Twilio still enforces at the carrier level, so this is defense-in-depth.
Whole-body match only — “please stop messaging me” is not treated as STOP, mirroring Twilio’s behavior; the advocate still sees that as a normal message.

No admin action required. Existing prospects who have previously texted STOP through their carrier are not retroactively marked — the system catches new opt-outs going forward.