Set Up SMS and Email
Overview
SMS and email are the two channels with real compliance weight attached, and both will quietly fail if set up carelessly - carriers filter unregistered SMS, and mailbox providers send unauthenticated email to spam. Neither failure is loud. You will not see an error; you will see poor results and assume the message was wrong. Getting registration and authentication right first is the single highest-value thing on this page.
Key Features
- Email sending with your own domain
- SMS from numbers you provision in Phone Settings
- Reusable SMS and email templates
- Broadcasts to segments as well as one-to-one sends
- A2P 10DLC registration handled through the platform
How to Set Up SMS and Email
Start A2P 10DLC registration early
If you are sending SMS to US numbers, register before you plan your first campaign. Registration involves your business details and a sample of the messages you intend to send, and it is reviewed rather than instant. Applications are rejected for vague use-case descriptions more than for anything else, so describe what you will actually send.
Provision a phone number
Go to Phone Settings (/phone-settings) to buy and configure a number. Use a number that matches the region you are messaging.
Authenticate your sending domain for email
In Email (/email), add your sending domain and publish the DNS records it gives you. Skipping this is the most common reason email lands in spam.
Warm up gradually
Send low volumes for the first couple of weeks and increase steadily. A new domain or number that suddenly sends thousands of messages looks exactly like a spammer to the systems judging it.
Build templates rather than retyping
Save the messages you send repeatedly as templates so the wording stays consistent and you can change it in one place.
Respect opt-out
Honour unsubscribe and STOP requests immediately. This is a legal requirement, not a courtesy, and the platform tracks consent so you can evidence it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I start sending SMS and email, and what is A2P 10DLC?
Email sending is configured from Email in the main navigation (/email), and phone numbers and SMS settings from Phone Settings (/phone-settings). Before you can send SMS to US numbers you must complete A2P 10DLC registration, which is a carrier requirement rather than an Inflowave one. Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked by the carriers, so do this first.
Why Set Up SMS and Email matters
Set Up SMS and Email sits inside the Channels & Data workflow inside Inflowave, and the way you configure it shapes how the rest of the platform behaves. SMS and email are the two channels with real compliance weight attached, and both will quietly fail if set up carelessly - carriers filter unregistered SMS, and mailbox providers send unauthenticated email to spam. Neither failure is loud. You will not see an error; you will see poor results and assume the message was wrong. Getting registration and authentication right first is the single highest-value thing on this page. Inflowave was built so the building blocks - accounts, automations, calendars, campaigns - connect cleanly without you having to glue together a third-party stack.
The fastest way to get value out of this is to treat the steps above as a checklist on your first pass, then come back and tune the details after you've seen real traffic flow through. Most teams using Inflowave at scale (agencies running 10-50 client accounts, creators with multiple profiles, businesses with several brand handles) find that the initial setup takes 15-30 minutes per account and pays back within the first day of saved manual replies.
If you run into anything unexpected, the support team replies inside business hours via the in-app chat and the documentation here covers every channels & data feature in the same level of detail. The Channels & Data section also has companion articles that walk through related workflows - the "Related articles" links at the bottom of this page point at the most-used ones in this category.
Finally, every channels & data feature in Inflowave is included in the Basic plan. There is no upsell gate to access set up sms and email or any of the steps described above. If your account is missing a button you see in this article, it's almost always because a workflow or permission needs to be enabled - not because it's a paid add-on. Reach out and the team will point you to the toggle.