SMS Receiving API for Verification Messages

What the receiving API does

The receiving workflow reads messages sent by another service to your assigned phone number. Use it to retrieve message content and arrival times for authorized verification and testing. Exact endpoints, retention, and request limits are supplied with the purchased product.

Recommended architecture

Your application should call a trusted backend that holds the service credential. That backend requests message records, normalizes the response, stores processed message identifiers, and returns only the fields your frontend needs.

This separation protects credentials and gives your team one place to enforce rate limits, timeout behavior, audit logging, and data retention.

Integration sequence

1. Select and order a number that matches the required country and duration.
2. Store service credentials in server-side environment variables or a secret manager.
3. Request records at a reasonable interval and apply timeouts.
4. Normalize message ID, sender, body, received time, and status.
5. Deduplicate processed records before triggering downstream actions.
6. Back off after failures and surface a clear operational status.

Suggested normalized fields

Provider responses can differ. A useful internal model usually includes message_id, phone_number, sender, body, received_at, and status. Treat timestamps as timezone-aware values and keep the provider's raw identifier where possible.

Security and reliability

• Never expose service tokens in HTML or public JavaScript.
• Allow only expected number identifiers in your backend route.
• Set connection and response timeouts for upstream requests.
• Filter placeholder responses such as “no code” before saving records.
• Limit retained message history according to your operational need.
• Do not log credentials or full sensitive messages unnecessarily.

API workflow FAQ