SMS receiving confirmation

Question

I am trying out different things with Twilio, but open for other solutions with Nexmo, Tropo or Plivo.

Here's a situation, I am sending an SMS texts from a server to bunch of clients. I can get a status back: like queued, sending, sent, or failed. Here's what Twilio says about SMS sent status:

"Sent" indicates that your message was successfully sent into the SMS 
network for delivery. However Twilio does not receive confirmation from 
the destination carrier that the message was received, and this is not 
a guarantee that the message has reached the intended device.
(https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/what-do-the-sms-statuses-mean)

So, my question is: does Plivo, Tropo or Nexmo (or any other service that I missed) do anything like that? I mean, knowing that an SMS was received either by client directly, or client's carrier would be really important.

PS. I'm not even sure if it is possible

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It's certainly possible with Nexmo - as the other answer and comment state, it's not possible with Twilio & Tropo. Plivo's docs look like their delivery receipts are similar to Nexmo's.

Nexmo sends a delivery receipt if it's supported by the carrier. In the US it's not, but internationally it is supported often. In those cases Nexmo will give your app a callback with a delivery receipt. You can also use the message ID to query for the message status.

This screencast shows checking the DLR from the dashboard, which is really just a UI on top of the API.

Kevin makes the point that this could be difficult if the message is bounced through multiple providers - one of Nexmo's focuses is getting as direct a connection as possible.

[Disclaimer: I do occasional developer evangelism for Nexmo.]

Answer 2

I'm a Tropo customer, and I've asked the same question, and so far, the answer's similar to what Kevin Burke gave for Twilio. It's hard to do, so there's no confirmation at this time. They do give some debugging information in the logs which is helpful with that first-hop negotiation, at least, even if it's hard to retrieve/parse easily. They are working on it, and have been very active adding new features.