Messaging consent

Lynomia Chat keeps one record per person of what they agreed to receive from you. Every campaign and every automated template asks that record before the message goes out, and a message it refuses is never handed to WhatsApp at all.

This is the part of the product where a mistake is expensive. Messaging people who asked you to stop is how a WhatsApp number loses its quality rating, and then its ability to send.

Two classes, opposite defaults

A message is one of two things, and the register answers for them separately.

No record at all is not consent. For a transactional message it means nobody objected, so the message goes. For a promotional message it means nobody agreed, so it does not. That asymmetry is the whole point of keeping two classes: treating them the same would either silence parcel notifications nobody objected to, or market at people who never agreed.

The class comes from Meta, not from you. A WhatsApp template Meta approved as UTILITY is transactional. Everything else is promotional — a MARKETING template, an AUTHENTICATION template, a template this inbox's synced list does not hold. Nothing you type decides it, which is deliberate: a marketing template attached to an order-shipped trigger is still marketing. SMS has no provider classification at all, so an SMS campaign is always promotional.

Three states

Withdrawn and suppressed both block, and they are not interchangeable. A withdrawal is the person's decision. A suppression is a delivery fault. They are kept apart so that fixing a delivery fault can never overturn somebody's opt-out: clearing a suppression leaves every withdrawal exactly where it was.

There is one record per person per class. Recording a new decision replaces the previous one; the sequence of decisions lives in the account's audit trail, not on the record.

STOP and START

A shopper can opt out without an agent. The keywords are matched on the inbound message, the moment it arrives, on every channel and in every account. This does not depend on your plan, on Commerce, or on anybody reading the conversation — an opt-out that only works when somebody is at their desk is not an opt-out.

Three rules decide whether a message counts as a keyword.

• The match is the whole message, not a word inside one. "Please stop sending me the wrong size" is a complaint for an agent to answer. It is not an opt-out, and reading it as one silences a customer who was asking for help.
• Case and surrounding punctuation are ignored. STOP, stop and stop. all match. Nothing else about the word is changed before it is compared.
• Anything longer than 20 characters is not a keyword, whatever it contains.

STOP means stop, for both classes. Somebody typing STOP is asking not to be messaged, and answering "that only applied to some of our messages" serves you rather than them. A shopper who wants only their parcel updates back can type START, which grants both again.

What is kept as evidence is the message's id and the keyword matched. The message text is never kept — a consent record is the last place a customer's own words should be copied to.

Recording a decision yourself

You may record what a shopper told you at a counter, on a call or on a paper form. Three things are true of it.

It is administrators only, and it needs a plan that includes Commerce. Whether a person receives automated messages from you is not an agent's call to change, and a list of who opted out of marketing is not an agent's to read.

An evidence note is required, not optional. A grant typed in by a merchant is a claim about a conversation that happened somewhere else; without a note saying where, it is indistinguishable from somebody adding a person to a marketing list. The note is 1 to 500 characters, is stored with the decision, and is kept alongside your name and the date.

There is no consent screen in the dashboard. The register is reached through the account API with your own access token — see your profile and security. Do not go looking for a settings page; there is not one. Four calls exist, all under /api/v1/accounts/{account_id}/commerce/:

One class per PUT, and the decision is marked as yours automatically. A withdrawal cannot be cleared. granted and withdrawn are the only states you may record, and a granted decision after a withdrawal is written as a new, evidenced decision rather than as an undo — which is what keeps the record honest. DELETE clears suppressions and nothing else.

A filter value the server does not recognise is refused rather than ignored. Asking to see who has opted out and being shown everybody instead would read the opt-ins as opt-outs, which is the one mistake this register cannot afford.

What a withdrawal blocks

A reply inside an open conversation is not marketing. The person wrote to you; answering them is the service they asked for. Consent gates the messages you start — templates and campaigns — and does not gate the conversation they started.

A refused message does not quietly disappear. It appears in the conversation marked Failed to send, with the reason underneath: this person asked not to be messaged. They can opt back in by replying START. A refused campaign recipient is recorded on the campaign instead — see why a campaign skipped someone.

A worked example

A customer asks at your counter to be told when their order ships, and says they do not want offers.

1. Record transactional — granted, with the note asked at Salmiya counter, 4 March, wants shipping updates.
2. Record promotional — withdrawn, with the note asked at Salmiya counter, 4 March, no offers.

Your order-shipped template now reaches them. Your campaigns do not, and no label or audience you build can put them back into one, because the refusal is applied after the audience is resolved.

Two weeks later they reply STOP to the shipping update. Both classes are now withdrawn, including the transactional one you recorded a grant for, and you cannot undo it. If they ask for the updates back, they type START.

Limits

• A promotional message needs a grant that exists, and only a Commerce plan can record one. Without Commerce there is no authorised way to record that somebody agreed, so a MARKETING template in a campaign, an automation rule or a flow reaches nobody. Order updates through an approved UTILITY template are unaffected. Opt-outs are honoured either way: a STOP reply writes a withdrawal in every account, on every plan.
• The composer is the one exception to that. In an account without Commerce, a marketing template an agent sends by hand is stopped only by a decision somebody actually made — a withdrawal or a suppression — rather than by the absence of a grant.
• A decision you record applies to the one class you named. A STOP keyword writes both, so a real opt-out stops everything; a merchant recording "no marketing" leaves order updates running, on purpose.
• Consent decides nothing about the 24-hour window, template approval or your messaging limit. Those are separate refusals with their own reasons — see the WhatsApp 24-hour window.
• A connected store can hold its own opt-in, separately from this. A shopper who ticked a marketing box at a store's own checkout is recorded against that store, and a campaign belonging to that store accepts either record. A refusal in either record stops the send, and neither record can overturn the other.
• The Audit Logs page has no wording for a consent change. The decision is written to the account's audit trail with its author, time and note, but audit logs does not describe it and its event type is not one of the types that page can filter on.
• Blocking a contact is not a consent decision. It stops what comes in, and it does also stop every campaign and template going out, under its own reason. It records nothing about what the person agreed to, and unblocking restores nothing they withdrew.

Related

• Why a campaign skipped someone
• WhatsApp campaigns
• The WhatsApp 24-hour window
• WhatsApp templates
• What connecting a store gives you
• Contacts

If it does not work

My campaign reached far fewer people than the recipient count promised. The count is already filtered by consent, but it is taken when you build the campaign and the recipients are resolved again at send time. Open View analytics on the campaign: No marketing consent on record and Customer opted out are reasons, not errors.

An agent's marketing template keeps failing with "has not opted in to marketing". Meta classifies that template as something other than UTILITY, so it is promotional, and this person has no promotional grant. A UTILITY template still sends to them.

A shopper says they replied STOP but was messaged anyway. Check what they actually sent. A keyword inside a longer sentence is not an opt-out. Record the withdrawal yourself, with their words as the note.

I cleared the suppression and they still receive nothing. Clearing a suppression never clears a withdrawal. Read the person's record: if the state is withdrawn, only they can change it, by replying START.

Nothing I send to this person arrives, and there is no consent record at all. Check whether the contact is blocked, and check the 24-hour window. Both refuse messages for their own reasons and neither writes anything here.

I cannot find the consent register in the dashboard. There is no screen for it. It is the API above, and it needs a plan that includes Commerce and an administrator's access token.