[buildbuildbuild]

Beware the edge case: I responded STOP to a message years ago, then was unable to receive SMS from a popular money transmission app during the signup flow to claim funds that a friend sent me.

After over a month of troubleshooting, it turns out that I had sent "STOP" to that number years ago on a different device (no longer visible in chat history) and now had to send "UNSTOP" in order to receive the phone verification SMS required to sign up for the service. It was a shared number between multiple apps.

[JaggedJax]

This happened to me with a major bank. They were using the same number for 2FA and some other types of texts. I got locked out of my account for a while because I had unsubscribed from their marketing texts. What an unbelievably dumb way to send 2FA codes.

[thebytefairy]

Had a similar thing happen to me, but for Facebook. Account got locked, to unlock I needed to verify identity via text. Never received the text because I had disabled getting text fb notifications, which apparently included account recovery. Managed to find this on some obscure thread to text some number to resubscribe and get it to work - no mechanism from fb, no alternate way to verify, no indication that this was the issue.

[grotorea]

I think something similar happened to me, but I used the phone's block and report feature. I assume it was the number of some SMS sending service that had both legitimate and spam clients.

[hypeatei]

Yet another reason why SMS 2FA should not be used. Shameful.

[sim7c00]

I find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism.

Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen.

In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketing and other types of messaging. That's not by number you 'STOP' and hence it won't have such effects. A marketeer/sales company is simply not allowed by law to dial your number for sales/marketing, so they have auto-lookups to that registry to prevent breaching the law. translated, it's the 'do-not-call-me-registry' :D aptly named.

it won't stop phishing messages etc., but not much will. if you'd block it from 1 number, they will just use the next number..

[no_op]

The US has a 'Do Not Call' registry for unsolicited phone calls, but technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts without prior consent in the first place. Thing is, 'consent' often just means failing to notice a checkbox during a signup flow or something, so people end up getting junk anyway.

Even more annoyingly, politicians wrote in an exception for themselves. In combination with the way campaign finance works in the US, this means that if you've ever give your number to any political campaign, it will be passed around forever and you'll have multiple politicians begging you for money for months leading up to every election. Each individual campaign/organization seems to respect 'STOP,' but once your number is on an e.g. 'Has ever donated to a Democratic candidate' list, there's seemingly no way to get it off for good. Thanks, Obama. (I gave him $50 in 2008.)

[pixelatedindex]

Just wanted to say that I find it curious that you have to text “UNSTOP” and not something like “START”, lol

[gwd]

So a "stopper" can also mean a plug (i.e., something you shove into the neck of a bottle or a pipe to stop things coming out). "Stop" can also then be a verb which means, "put a stopper into"; and "unstop" can mean "remove the stopper from".

Since (it sounds like) this is talking about blocking and unblocking the flow of messages from that number, using "UNSTOP" (remove the thing blocking it) makes more sense than "START"; particularly as the latter seems to imply that you're asking to immediately begin receiving messages, whereas the former simply means to no longer block the messages.

[sim7c00]

it's because of ungood design

[jaxn]

START works as well. At least for numbers provided by twilio: https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...

[dspillett]

There probably is a START instruction internally, but it won't take action against a number for which there has been a previous STOP. So UNSTOP acts like FORCE START.

[lvkv]

Unfortunately, the world is opt-out, not opt-in.

[elfrinjo]

Probably a Cisco engineer who built that

[MaxMatti]

Wouldn't that also apply if you blocked the number?

[mway]

That only works if the marketing campaign exclusively uses the number you're blocking. In some cases - for example, political SMS in the US - it turns into whack-a-mole unless you unsubscribe properly.

[falcor84]

Unblocking might be faster, as it's something you only need to do on your end

[aendruk]

I’ve encountered a couple instances of businesses that 1) send me unsolicited marketing mail, 2) react to that being flagged as spam by internally blocklisting me, then 3) silently fail to send transactional mail such as password resets.

[Mattwmaster58]

A similar thing happened to me with my Amazon account with a forgotten password. I ended up just creating a new account.