Reply STOP. That is the whole of it. The number is opted out immediately and permanently, nothing we send can reach it again, and it happens in ordinary code before anything else looks at your message — no AI decides whether you meant it.

Nine other words work exactly as well, because people type what they mean rather than what a regulation lists: STOP ALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, OPTOUT, OPT OUT, REMOVE ME and STOPALL. Capitals do not matter and a full stop on the end does not matter.

Reply HELP (or INFO) and you will get an answer naming the business you are dealing with, so you know who is texting you.

We are not the business texting you. AvenDesk operates the receptionist on behalf of a local business — a plumber, an electrician, a garage — and the number that texted you is theirs. STOP stops the texts either way. If you want your information deleted rather than just the messages stopped, our Privacy Policy explains how to ask, and we will pass it on if you cannot reach them.

Changed your mind? Text START (or UNSTOP, RESUME, OPTIN, OPT IN) and the number is opted back in.

Published in full, because a keyword list that is nearly right is worse than none — somebody will text one of these and find out.

The receptionist texts as part of running a business's front desk. Specifically:

Message and data rates may apply. What your carrier charges you for a text is between you and them, and it is not something we control or can waive.

Message frequency varies and is not a fixed number per month, because these are transactional and conversational messages rather than a campaign — a booking made is a confirmation sent, and a question asked is an answer returned.

Review requests and similar marketing-type messages are held outside 8am to 9pm in the business's own time zone, and released when the window opens.

Messages about a booking you actually made are not held, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. A confirmation for an appointment made at 11pm is useful at 11pm, and a reminder held until the morning can arrive after the appointment it was reminding you about — late is worse than early for those. Nor is a reply an owner types by hand held: if somebody texts a plumber at 11pm, the plumber may answer at 11pm.

Carriers and message aggregators can filter, delay or refuse messages for their own reasons, and we cannot override a carrier decision. We do not guarantee delivery of any message.

Every automated message identifies the business by name, because a text from an unknown number with a link in it is indistinguishable from a scam.

US carriers require every business sending application-to-person text messages to be registered under 10DLC. We submit that registration on your behalf, through our carrier, to The Campaign Registry — using the legal name, address, tax number and contact details you give us.

Those details must be accurate. Carriers reject, throttle or block traffic sitting on a bad registration, and there is no appeal we can make on your behalf. Registration is also not instant and is not ours to grant: a brand is usually vetted in minutes, a campaign can take a day or more, and either can come back rejected.

Use a number for the traffic it was registered for. A campaign registered for appointment confirmations is not a channel for a marketing blast, and using it as one puts your number, and other businesses on the same carrier, at risk of being blocked.

Telephone Consumer Protection Act compliance is yours, not ours. We give you the tooling; the consent behind every message is your responsibility, and the statutory damages are per message.

You will: only message people who have given you the consent the law requires; keep a record of that consent; honour STOP and every other opt-out immediately, including ones somebody gives you by voice, by email or in person; never send marketing to a number on a do-not-call list; and never use the Services for bulk or unsolicited messaging.

What we enforce for you, in code, whether you remember or not: an opted-out number cannot be messaged again by anything the platform sends — that check sits at the very bottom of the sending stack, underneath every feature, so a reminder, a follow-up, a review request and a reply are all stopped by the same guard and no new feature can route around it. An attempt to send to somebody who opted out is refused and flagged for a member of our staff to look at.

Marketing-type automated sends carry two further limits: the quiet hours above, and a daily cap per business so this cannot become a broadcast tool.

A flag is not a suspension. Our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is screened and what is kept, and our Terms set out what happens next — a person decides, never a machine.

Breaking these rules is a breach of the acceptable-use section of our Terms, and the consequence there ranges from being told to fix it to having the account closed and not reopened.

The content of a message, the number it came from and the number it went to are processed to deliver it and are stored in the business's portal, exactly as a call transcript is. Our carrier sees all three, because it is the thing carrying the message.

Opt-outs are kept even after an account closes what it can, for as long as needed to make sure a number that said stop is not messaged again. That is deliberate: an opt-out list is the one record where deleting it harms the person it belongs to.

Everything else — how long messages are kept, who can see them, how to have them deleted — is in our Privacy Policy, and where we process on a business's behalf, in our Data Processing Addendum.

We do not sell message content or telephone numbers to anybody, and we never send marketing of our own to a number that reached us through a customer's account.