{"id":733,"date":"2026-07-25T15:19:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T15:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/text.email\/blog\/?p=733"},"modified":"2026-07-25T21:37:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T21:37:58","slug":"required-ack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/text.email\/blog\/required-ack\/","title":{"rendered":"Required Acknowledgment: Keep Sending Critical Alerts Until It’s Confirmed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

text.email is made for cutting through the noise to make sure you don’t miss critical alerts. But until now, there was nothing we could do to make sure you (or someone on your team) actually did something<\/em> about those alerts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s why we just added Required Acknowledgment<\/strong> to text.email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Required Acknowledgment, text.email will re-send the most critical alerts until the recipient confirms they’ve seen it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s how to set it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Turn On Required Acknowledgment in text.email<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Head to text.email and go into your account Settings<\/strong>. Scroll down until you get to the Required Acknowledgment section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To turn on Required Acknowledgment, change the “Repeat every (minutes)” field from 0 to a number<\/strong>. For instance, entering 5 would mean alerts go out (roughly) every five minutes until acknowledgment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up you can optionally chose how long the texts should keep going out<\/strong>. For instance, if you enter 60, text alerts will go out for an hour if no one acknowledges them. At the 60-minute mark, the alerts will stop regardless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The maximum is 12 hours (720 minutes). After that we gotta stop texting you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, you can (and probably should) add some phrases to the Require acknowledgment when the message contains<\/strong> box. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, if you only want to require acknowledgment if the server goes down, and your automated system sends a message that says “Server down” when that happens, you could put “server down” in the box. (It’s case insensitive.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you leave that box empty, every<\/em> alert from your text.email address will require acknowledgment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once you’re all set, scroll to the bottom of the page to Save Settings<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Acknowledge a Text to Stop the Repeating Alerts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Alright. You’ve set up Required Acknowledgment and an alert goes out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

text.email sends the email to SMS message, as it normally does, but adds a line at the bottom: Reply ACK ##### to acknowledge.<\/code> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The number is a code that the recipient has to send as a reply to the message to get the sequence to stop. Every future alert they get for this incident will include the same code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if the code was ACK 48271<\/code>, they could enter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n