A phone number can stop working without anything appearing to break. Carriers don't tell you they've labelled you spam — your texts just quietly stop arriving and your answer rate slides. By the time it's obvious, you've burned weeks of outreach on a dead line.
Settings → Number health is the early-warning system. It scores every number you send from over the last 30 days and tells you which ones are behaving like numbers that have been flagged.
The verdicts
- Healthy — nothing to act on.
- Watch — one signal is drifting. Worth a look, not a panic.
- At risk — something is genuinely wrong, and volume is being wasted.
- No data — not enough activity to judge. That's an honest answer, not a gap being papered over.
Anything at risk or on watch is summarised in a banner at the top, so you don't have to scan the list.
The five signals
- Answer rate — how many of this number's dials connected. The strongest tell isn't the absolute figure, it's the comparison: this number is scored against your best-performing number. One line running at a third of its sibling's rate on the same lists is the classic spam-label signature.
- Text delivery — what share of texts the carrier rejected, and why, translated into plain English: not registered for A2P / 10DLC, filtered as spam, the number isn't usable on the connected account, unreachable or invalid recipients, or a provider rate limit. The first two are reputation problems; the others are usually data or configuration.
- Opt-out rate — carriers throttle above 0.5%. Two guards stop this condemning a number on noise: it needs real volume behind it and more than one or two unsubscribes. Below that it says so plainly rather than flashing red at one person changing their mind.
- Call volume — dials per day against a carrier-safe ceiling of about 100.
- Text volume — texts per day against a ceiling of about 150.
Both volume figures are divided by the days the number actually ran, not by the 30-day window — otherwise a number that sprinted for a week would look idle.
What to do about a flagged number
- Read the reason first. "Not registered for A2P / 10DLC" is a paperwork fix, not a reputation one — complete registration and delivery recovers. "Filtered as spam" is a reputation problem and needs the steps below.
- Move volume onto a healthier number. Lower the flagged number's daily cap and raise a healthy one's. Rotation redistributes automatically.
- Rest it. A couple of weeks of near-silence, then a slow warm-up, recovers a lot of numbers. Continuing to blast from a filtered number does not.
- Fix the cause, not the number. If opt-outs are driving it, a new number will burn exactly the same way in a month. Look at the message, the list, and the frequency.
Numbers you removed still appear
A number that only exists in your history is listed and marked not connected. That's on purpose — "why is a number I deleted showing here" is less confusing than history silently vanishing, and the record still tells you what that number did while it ran.
What's next
To raise capacity the healthy way, read Connect multiple Quo numbers. To keep an eye on the number that actually drives throttling, put an SMS Opt-Outs widget with a weekly limit on your dashboard — see Analytics & KPI goals.