SMS Destination Management

Overview

Destination management gives you control over which countries your workspace is permitted to send SMS to. By maintaining an explicit allowlist, you can:

• Prevent unintended spend — block countries you don't operate in so accidental or misconfigured sends don't incur charges.

• Reduce fraud exposure — high-cost or high-fraud destinations (often used in SMS pumping attacks) can be blocked at the workspace level before any traffic is attempted.

• Meet compliance requirements — some organizations are legally restricted from communicating with recipients in certain jurisdictions. Blocking those countries enforces this at the workspace level.

Any message sent to a country not on your allowed list is rejected immediately with a DestinationBlocked error before a message record is created.

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How to manage destinations

You can manage the allowed destinations list via the UI or directly through the API.

Via the UI

Navigate to the Manage Destinations page using either path:

• Settings → Channels → SMS → Manage Destinations

• Developer → SMS Setup → Manage Destinations

To allow a country:

1. Open the Select a country dropdown.

2. Select the country you want to enable.

3. Click Save.

To block a country:

1. Find the country in the Allowed destinations list.

2. Click the × next to the country name.

3. Click Save.

Changes take effect within 1 minute for new send requests.

Via the API

For programmatic management — for example, updating allowed destinations as part of a provisioning workflow or enforcing policy across multiple workspaces — use the Destination Management API.

The API lets you list current allowed destinations, add countries, and remove countries without going through the UI.

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API behavior when a destination is blocked

When a message is sent to a blocked destination, the API responds synchronously:

Field	Value
HTTP status	422 Unprocessable Entity
code	DestinationBlocked
message	The destination is blocked and cannot receive messages.

Because the rejection happens before message creation:

• No message object is created

• No status webhook is fired

• No credits are charged

For additional help resolving SMS errors, see Troubleshoot SMS Delivery Failures.