August 2025 SMS Gateway Release Notes - Munvo | The Marketing Solutions Specialists

August 2025 - SMS Gateway Release Notes

1. Feature Enhancement: WhatsApp 24-Hour Conversation Window Tracking

This feature introduces automated tracking and enforcement of WhatsApp’s 24-hour messaging window to ensure all automated conversation flows are compliant and cost-effective. The system now intelligently manages the transition between free-form session messages and template-based messages.

Timestamp Tracking for User Messages: Automatically tracks and stores the timestamp of the last incoming user message for every WhatsApp conversation.
Context-Aware Conversation Management: Developed logic to maintain conversation context across the 24-hour boundary, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Compliance Logging: Implemented a robust logging mechanism to record window status changes for auditing and compliance verification purposes.
Maintained Integration Compatibility: Ensured full compatibility with existing SMPP and HTTP integrations.

Business Value: This enhancement directly addresses key business needs by automating compliance with WhatsApp’s Business Policy, which mitigates risks and optimizes messaging costs. By intelligently managing the 24-hour window, the system improves operational efficiency and business agility. This leads to an enhanced customer experience by maintaining conversation continuity and ensures that marketing automation efforts are both effective and compliant.

Note: This feature leverages the existing WhatsApp integration and the two-way conversation tree engine.

2. Feature Enhancement: WhatsApp Template Configuration in Flowchart Nodes

To enhance content management and scalability, this feature introduces the ability to configure relevant flowchart nodes to use a Content SID from a Twilio centralized content management system instead of static text. This allows for dynamic, version-controlled content to be used in Rich Content templates, such as Quick Replies.

Content Source Selection: Added a UI option in relevant flowchart nodes to allow users to select between using static text and providing a Content SID.
SID Input and Validation: Implemented a dedicated input field for the Content SID, including basic format validation to ensure proper entry.
Graceful Error Handling: If a Content SID is invalid or not found, the node execution fails gracefully, logging a clear error to assist with troubleshooting.

Business Value: This enhancement improves operational efficiency by significantly reducing the time required to manage and update content across multiple flows. It enhances brand consistency and compliance by leveraging centrally managed templates. This increases business agility, allowing for faster deployment of content changes and facilitating the delivery of personalized, localized customer experiences at scale.

Note: User documentation has been updated to explain how to use Content SIDs within flowchart nodes. Please review the documentation for examples and details on the error-handling mechanism.

3. Feature Enhancement: Message Size Validation

To improve system stability and prevent processing errors, this feature introduces a validation check that measures the byte size of message payloads before they are enqueued.

Pre-enqueue Size Validation: Implemented a validation that automatically calculates the byte size of a message payload before attempting to enqueue it.
Strict Size Limit Enforcement: The system will now return an error and reject any message that exceeds the limit.
Comprehensive Size Calculation: Message size is calculated using UTF-8 encoding and accurately accounts for any base64 encoding overhead for binary data, as well as the size of any message attributes.
Enhanced Logging and Error Handling: Added a robust error handling mechanism for oversized messages. The system now logs all messages that exceed the size limit, including the actual message size in the log data for improved monitoring and debugging.

Business Value: This enhancement increases the reliability of our message processing pipeline by preventing oversized messages from causing downstream failures. By proactively validating message sizes, the system ensures more stable performance, reduces troubleshooting time for developers, and avoids potential data processing interruptions.

Note: Integrations must be prepared to handle errors for messages exceeding the limit. Please review the updated documentation for details on the error handling mechanism.

4. Feature Enhancement: Link Shortening for Templates

To improve functional consistency, this enhancement introduces an optional setting for templates to automatically shorten URLs using the integrated Twilio Link Shortening feature. This allows users for templated messages to potentially reduce message segment costs.

Template-Level Configuration: Added a clear UI option within template settings to enable or disable automatic Twilio Link Shortening.
Seamless URL Shortening: When enabled, the system instructs Twilio to automatically find and shorten any URLs in the final message content.
Consistent Behavior: If the option is disabled or omitted, messages are sent with original, unmodified URLs, maintaining the existing behavior and providing full control.
Leverages Existing Integration: This feature utilizes the existing Twilio Messaging Service SID configuration, ensuring it works seamlessly with your current setup.

Business Value: This enhancement provides access to Twilio’s link shortening for templates. By shortening URLs, it can reduce message segment counts, leading to potential cost savings. It also creates a more consistent and predictable experience by aligning template functionality with the existing capabilities of the SMS Gateway, simplifying operations for developers.

Note: This feature requires that your configured Twilio Messaging Service has Link Shortening enabled. Please review the updated template documentation for details on how to enable and use this feature.

5. Feature Enhancement: Link Shortening in Flowchart Nodes

To improve message efficiency and enable analytics, this enhancement introduces an optional setting within relevant flowchart nodes to automatically shorten URLs in SMS messages. This removes the need for users to shorten links manually.

Node-Level Configuration: Added a clear UI option within applicable flowchart nodes to enable or disable automatic link shortening for each message.
Automatic URL Shortening: When enabled, the system instructs Twilio to automatically find and shorten any URLs in the final message content.
Graceful Handling: The feature is designed to handle messages without URLs gracefully, sending them as-is without error. Invalid URLs will be sent unmodified.
Redirect Integrity: All shortened links are fully functional and correctly redirect to the original destination URL.

Business Value: This enhancement improves operational efficiency by eliminating the need for users to shorten links in a separate process. By shortening URLs, it helps optimize character count, which can lead to reduced message segment costs and improved message readability. This also provides the capability to track click-through rates, offering valuable engagement analytics.

Note: This feature leverages the integrated link shortening service. Analytics and reporting for individual link performance may be addressed in a future update.

6. Feature Enhancement: Portuguese Language Support for Keywords

To enhance our global reach and improve user accessibility, this feature introduces full language support for Portuguese (PT) within the flowchart keyword management system. Users can now build automated message flows for Portuguese-speaking users.

New Language Option: “Portuguese (PT)” is now available as a selectable option in the “Language” dropdown when configuring keywords.
Full Character Support: The system correctly processes, stores, and matches keywords and replies containing Portuguese special characters (e.g., ç, ã, õ, á).
Accurate Keyword Matching: The engine accurately routes incoming SMS messages based on Portuguese keywords to trigger the correct automated reply.
Regular Expression Compatibility: The “Use Regular Expression” feature is fully compatible with Portuguese keyword patterns and character sets.
No Service Interruption: Existing English, French, and Spanish keyword functionalities are unaffected by this update.

Business Value: This enhancement allows businesses to create fully localized SMS automation flows for Portuguese-speaking users. By enabling interaction in their native language, it improves customer engagement, expands market reach, and enhances the overall user experience.

Note: When adding new keywords, you can now select “Portuguese (PT)” to create dedicated interaction flows. Please ensure any connected systems are configured to handle the character encoding to support all special characters.

7. Performance Enhancement: Outbound Message Pagination

The outbound message endpoint has been improved to resolve non-deterministic behavior during pagination and enhance overall performance.

Deterministic Pagination: Optimized the transaction endpoint by ordering records in ascending order by their last modified time. This ensures consistent pagination results, preventing duplicate or missing records across pages.
Enhanced Query Stability: The stable sorting order ensures that transactions created or modified during a pagination sequence do not affect the ongoing results.
Improved Timeout Management: Enhanced timeout management and query performance for requests involving large message transaction sets.
Backward Compatibility: The changes have been implemented while maintaining backward compatibility for existing client integrations.

Business Value: These changes provide more reliable message history processing, reduce system timeouts, and improve the user experience for transaction queries. This update resolves significant data integrity issues by ensuring that clients receive complete and accurate message transaction sets.

8. Bug Fix: Unnecessary "Unsaved Changes" Warning Removed

Resolved an issue where the “You have an unsaved flowchart” warning would incorrectly appear when users navigated away from a flowchart without making any modifications. The system now accurately detects if a flowchart has been edited, ensuring the warning dialog is only triggered when there are actual unsaved changes.

Business Value: This fix reduces user friction and removes unnecessary interruptions from the design workflow. It improves the user experience by eliminating a redundant step, while still providing essential protection against the accidental loss of work.

Note: This change is applied automatically. No action is required from users to benefit from the improved behavior.

Please review all updates carefully before upgrading. Contact our support team with any questions about these changes or assistance with the upgrade process.