Text Messaging - We Deliver

Icetrak was formed in 2002 by the two current owners and directors. Originally based in Worcester, in 2015 the business bought and moved to a modern office on a business estate at the foot of the Malvern Hills, close to the Morgan Motor Company.

We have been messaging specialists going back to the 1990s when nobody could get by without lots of fax machines or fax software and everybody had a pager. Now text messaging is our business (with some cloud based fax too) but our core values haven't changed - the best products and the best customer service.

We have over 1,000 UK customers from sole traders to international retail banks. The company is well managed with a strong balance sheet, no long term debt and no outside shareholders. The company has been profitable year on year for the last 12 years.

We develop and own the entire Icetrak infrastructure ourselves, hardware and software and it is located in multiple data centres to offer best resilience and performance.

The range and features of the Icetrak services is a direct result of giving customers what they want and not what we think they need. It is quite possible that you might want something that we don't have as a standard feature. If this is the case and if we can fix it by spending our time and our money then we'll do it. The best products get developed this way.

We welcome any questions about our business, our people and our services and we encourage you to take up the free trial offer as a way of checking us out to see if we meet your expectations of what a first rate supplier is.

Since 2002

We suggest you start and run your account with a payment that covers you for one to two months worth of text messages. We will credit check your company and if positive your first invoice will be on 7 days terms and subsequent ones will be 30 days. You can pay by BACS, card or cheque. We also offer a direct debit service which could extend your terms to up yo 44 days.

We will ask you for a simple email to confirm you would like to cancel your services and then we'll cancel it for you.

If you are a credit user and you have some remaining credit on your account we'll return it to you

You can cancel your service at any time. We do not ask you for any long term commitments whatsoever.

No. Your credit stays on your account until you've used it. There is no time limit whatsoever.

Our service will automatically email you when your credit is getting low.

We can set up automatic top-ups for you if required which will ensure you keep control of your spend.

We don't publish our price list here on the website but we'll happily send you one as soon as we receive your enquiry. We're competitive and we're flexible on terms too which most providers aren't. If we know a bit about which services you want, how many messages you think you might send, how you want to pay upfront or in arrears, what volume points you might be happy with then we can do a better job of getting the right price and hopefully improving a bit on our price list.

You can email us or phone us and invariably we'll be able to deal with your issue straight away. In the unlikely event we can't which will only be because we're helping another customer we'll be in touch within one working hour maximum but typically 5 to 10 minutes.

It's complicated to explain but very easy to understand when you see it working. We suggest you add the 2way text messaging service to your trial and see it working in anger.

In essence when we receive a reply we look for all your users that have sent a message out to the replying number over the previous 24 hour and we'll route the reply to all of those users. We'll also copy the reply to a central mailbox if required so you can archive the response.

When a recipient receives a message the Sender ID is usually displayed on the phone detailing the number the message was sent from.

We can set a Sender ID as either a 11 character alphanumeric string identifying your business or we can set it as a mobile phone number.

If we set the Sender ID to a mobile phone number any replies will go back to that number

If you have a alphanumeric Sender Id recipients will not be able to reply to your text messages.

What happens if they try is dependent on their phone. Usually they will get a message send error

By default we would crop your message to 160 characters for you. If you want longer messages then we can switch on long messages for you on your whole account or just for individual users.

Long messages are delivered over the SMS networks as separate text messages and then recombined by the phones on receipt and displayed as a single message.

The phones need to know the order required to recombine the received multipart messages so we have to pinch 7 characters from each 160 which gets used to encode the message part order etc.

Therefore when we ask you how many parts you'd like we talk about multiples of 153 characters.

N.B. Each part is delivered to the phones as a separate text message so this has cost implications

Yes, absolutely.

Text messaging (SMS) is a store and forward system whereby providers like ourselves forward text messages into the mobile phone networks. A lot of text providers will mark your messages as delivered when they have been sent into the networks.

As a business orientated service we wait for delivery confirmation to come back from the phone operators before we mark any message as delivered.

For all UK messages you will only get confirmation of delivery when the phone has acknowledged receipt of the message.

Unfortunately not.

To send a text message an encoded packet of data is sent into the network operators. Part of this data encodes the sender of the message. Unfortunately the specification used to define data structure only allows for an alphanumeric Sender Id or a numeric Sender Id but not both

To get a reply to a text message we have to specify a numeric Sender Id

The good news however is that if a recipient associates your 2way/reply number with a contact in their phones address book the phone should show the name of the contact when a message is received from your number

Yes you can send international text messages.

We are very lucky however in the UK that our mobile phone operators are very liberal which means you can pretty much send anything to anywhere in the UK. All UK networks can provide fully comprehensive delivery reports if requested.

The further you move away from Europe particularly the Far East and America the network operators become more restrictive and reliability becomes less consistent.

We can send messages to almost all the countries around the world but some countries cannot provide the level of service we normally guarantee with UK networks.

In particular some networks will provide network delivery reports rather than phone delivery reports so they can't guarantee delivery to a phone.

N.B. This is an international network issue and not an issue with our service. If other service providers tell you they can guarantee delivery to international destinations with proof of delivery then it's worth questioning their claims.

Yes you can send text messages to the USA with one proviso.

To send a text message to a recipient in the USA and protect yourself from litigation you "must" get the explicit approval from that recipient indicating that they are happy to receive text messages from you. The required written signature can be obtained via email, Web site form, text message, telephone key press or voice recording.

By default we block all sends to USA numbers. We can however override the block if you send us a list of the numbers for the recipients that have explicitly agreed to receive text messages from you.

If you wish to send text messages to the USA please ensure you follow these guidelines:

You should have written consent from your contacts approving the sending of text messages from you. The required written signature can be via email, website form (box clicked) text message, telephone key press or a voice recording. If you used a web-form for opt-in, always provide a link to your CTIA compliant mobile T&C's. You should have an unambiguous policy available for viewing or downloading. You should maintain complete records of single or double opt-in confirmation messages on file with a time stamp. If you use a web-form for opt-in, you must immediately send a double-opt in confirmation request to validate the mobile phone. The opt-in confirmation message you send to new recipients should be compliant with MMA and CTA guidelines. You must maintain a "unsubscribe/do not call" list and comply with all requests to not be called again. When such a request is received, the requester may not be messaged again on behalf of the business or activity for whom the solicitation is made. The content of your message must be directly related to the original purpose the recipient opted in to. Your company name/brand name should be clearly mentioned at the top of the text message. Every message must include OPTOUT or STOP details. Don't send messages outside of 08:00 to 21:00 local time of recipient.