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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:04:18+00:00

Are there any texting services out there (like Twilio) with APIs that allow you

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Are there any texting services out there (like Twilio) with APIs that allow you to see what message another message is in response to? For example: I want to tell whether message 3 is in response to 1 or 2.

  1. A->B: Do you like ice cream?
  2. A->B: Do you like pizza?
  3. B->A: Yes.

I’m guessing that there’s just no threadedness to text messages, and this is impossible. But might as well have a canonical answer out there…. Reasons for this belief:

  1. When you send emails to a phone number at txt.att.net, it uses a different number each time.
  2. The texting services that I’ve looked at don’t offer the feature
  3. The phone UIs I’ve used all present it as a flat message list rather than a threaded list

Can someone confirm this?

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  1. Editorial Team

    There is no native support for this type of functionality in SMS. Message threading for SMS is inferred on the client side from context. When I send a text to person 1, if I receive a reply from person 1 within a given time-frame, I can assume that it was part of the same “conversation”. (I actually implemented something like this for a chat client that I was working on)

    I have also seen where the original message is included with the response, and the client can group the messages accordingly (take a look at gmail), but this could be messy if your clients were not the same.

    Just a few thoughts.

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