Long SMS will be blocked – Send MMS instead
Messages sent with greater than 10 segments will be blocked by the mobile carriers. If your message contains three or more segments, consider sending it as MMS using a text file as an attachment.
Before sending messages in Captivated, please use this segment calculator to understand how many segments your message will be. If it is over 3 segments, send it as an MMS instead. Learn how to do that at the end of this page.
Below states in greater depth how a text message segment is calculated.
Types of Encoding
Encoding is the process of converting data from one form to the other so that it can be processed, transmitted, and translated uniformly. When you input text using a keyboard or in some other way, the character encoding maps characters you choose to specific bytes in computer memory, and then to display the text, it reads the bytes back into characters.
If you use anything other than the most basic English text, people may not be able to read the content you create unless you say what character encoding you used. For example, you may intend the text to look like this:
but it may actually display like this:
In the context of messaging, encoding is important so that the message is accurately transferred and rendered as intended.
- GSM-7 is a character encoding standard used for commonly used letters and symbols in many languages.
- UCS-2 is a character encoding standard used if a message cannot be encoded using GSM-7 or when a language requires more than 128 characters to be rendered.
When sending SMS messages, Captivated’s carrier will automatically send messages in the most compact encoding possible. If there are any non GSM-7 characters in your message body, our carrier will automatically change to UCS-2 encoding (which will limit message bodies to ~70 characters each depending on the number of segments).
What is a segment?
Depending on the message content (plain text, emojis, special characters, etc.), Captivated’s carrier will use either the GSM-7 or UCS-2 encoding to send it. Each encoding has limitations to the number of characters that can be sent:
- 160 characters for GSM-7 (e.g. Latin-1/9 and GSM8) = one segment
- 70 characters for UCS-2 (e.g. message with emojis) = one segment
The texting industry as a whole counts messages by segments; therefore, customers will be charged for each individual message segment sent to downstream carriers. For example:
Please refrain from using emojis in text messages as one emoji counts as 80 characters.
How to make a text message an MMS
Copy your desired text and paste it into a word document. Then, screenshot the text to make it a .png. Then send the.png as your message in Captivated.