Message Length and Segments
When creating an SMS you'll see a segment and character count. This calculate and estimate the number of segments your text message will use. This guide is meant to explain the break down for added insight onto how SMS segments work and why one message may count for more segments than another.
What is an SMS Segment?
Sending a text message has a limited number of characters. and longer messages are broken up into pieces (segments).
This is how this impacts your SMS usage:
- If you send more than 160 characters this needs to send multiple segments.
- Special Tags may expand to use more than the number of characters they display as
- If you include special characters (ex: emoji) segment size is now half, because emoji need more data
In short, avoid emoji and keep your message consicise and be smart about using special tags in SMS to ensure you can keep your message to a single segment.
Segments are what your TapMango SMS usage and billing reflect.
[Click to expand for more details about SMS segments]
Details about Segments
When creating an SMS in TapMango you will see a count of the messages sent as well as the number of segments that message will consume. A segemnt is the number of actual text messages TapMango must sent through our providers to deliver that message to your customers. In short, the more characters used the more segments sent
Why segments and not 'messages'?
Text Messaging (SMS, or Short Message Service) is nearly as old as cell phones themselves. Each 'text' (segment) has a maximum amount of data it can be; this is commonly 160 characters.
In the early days of cell phone texting this was a hard limit and you'd need to send a second message after your first. As time passed this issue went away and you could send as long of a 'message' as you'd want - but your wireless carrier would still count this as multiple messages sent and bill you accordingly. TapMango is bound by these same rules.
Why do Emojis reduce my segment size?
A single SMS has a max size limit, in order to send an emoji the type of text (text encoding) must change to one that supports emoji. This causes all characters used to take up more than twice the space if an emoji wasn't used.
So, your rule is that using an emoji means all text uses more data and therefore you have less space per SMS segment.
[Click to expand for more details about character encoding]
Details about using Emoji in SMS/Character encording.
Text in digital formats follows something called encoding. The encoding dictates the overall set of available characters you can actually type. Different types of encoding have access to different sets of charcters. The SMS providers, carriers, and handset manufactuers decided on two main types of encoding to use. GSM-7 (Global System for Mobile Communications) and UCS-2 (Universal Character Coded Character Set).
GSM-7 is a very small character set that was originally designed to minimize the data required to send text across mobile networks. It's great for most Anglo-Saxon based languages (English, French, Spanish, German, etc) but has a limited set of characters
[Click to expand] GSM Characters (Source: Wikipedia)
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UCS-2 covers almost all modern characters used in computing/digital text today. Non english character and emoji are common examples. It's awesome for content but using it requires more space per character.
This means if you you include any non-GSM-7 characters your whole message has to be UCS-2 and you're now working with 70 characters per message segment.
Calculating Segments and Characters
Reference the following chart for a general idea of how many characters you will have per SMS segment sent in a single message. See below for a more the chart for a more detailed explanation.
| Segments | Standard Characters (GSM-7) | Special Characters (UCS-2) |
| 1 | 141 | 51 |
| 2 | 287 | 115 |
| 3 | 440 | 182 |
[Click to expand for more details about calculating segment length]
GSM vs UCS-2
The above cover this, if your message uses simple GSM characters you have 160 characters per segment. If you have any special characters it is now 70 characters per segment.
Unsubscribe Message
The unsubscribe message is always ammended to the end of every SMS you send out in TapMango's system. This consumes 19 of the total characters used in creating your message. This message is required on all marketing SMS and cannot be changed.
Joining Segments
When you require multiple segments the size is reduced to 153 characters for GSM and 63 characters for UCS. This is because when sending multi-segment SMS a small bit of extra info is needed in order to tell the phone receiving the message how to 'build' the whole message (what order the segments should appear). This is called a 'data header'
Account Segment Limit
By default TapMango accounts have a limit of 3 segments per text message. This means our system will not allow you to create or send a message that would be 3 segments or longer. If you need to expand this please contact tapmango support and request a higher limit
Generally speaking if you are consistently wanting to send 4+ segments we would recommend adding tapmango's MMS feature because MMS does not have the same segment limits as an SMS would
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