Generally known as the “Do Not Disturb (DND)”, it is the service that allows you enjoy a bit of fresh air when it comes to receiving promotional SMS from your network. Consider the DND service as your way to tell your network provider to stop promotional SMS’ they send to you.
The DND service is enforced by the National Communication Authority, and all the network providers in Ghana are supposed to implement a shortcode their users could simply text to as a way to opt out immediately for a period of time.
DND service is a strongly enforced in Nigeria.
We all check our phones 2 million times already. The overhead of looking over our phones just to notice nothing else but a promotional SMS from our network provider can be annoying. This especially happens when you’re on the tip of your chair waiting for an important SMS alert.
The promotional messages take all sorts of form and shape. It might be about a gospel artist promoting their new release to a so-called Visa-giving company ready to offer you a one-time visa win to Eritrea.
This is not to say promotional messages from network providers are all annoying and irrelevant. No! The point is, most of these messages come in at the wrong time. In many cases, showing the right ad at the wrong time makes the ad a horrible one.
Many of the network providers likely don’t take this simple common sense into consideration, sending all the promotional messages they have anytime anyhow any day without any sort of respect to their users. Of course, they own the network, however, without any user base, any network provider is useless.
A little bit of respect to us, the customers will do. Fortunately, the network providers have pledged not to respect us, but via the DND service, the customers are also able to get in control and opt out of receiving such promotional messages for a period of time.
Let us consider what shortcode is the kill switch to stop promotional SMS, as at the time of writing this article.
How to Stop Promotional SMS
For Airtel, the shortcode to send stop to is 455
The promotional SMS will cease for 48 hours, then resume. The fact that they can’t put a stop to this thing entirely gives you an idea how much they earn from the promotional messages. If it ain’t fetching, they probably would have stopped long ago.
Automation
Since the promotional SMS will resume after a short while, you might want to automate the process of sending the text message using an app like Automate. (Will share a guide soon)
If you’re on iOS, please look for something that can automate the sending of SMS after a time interval.
At the moment, I only found the shortcode for the Airtel DND. The other networks, I have no idea and will update this article as and when I get them.
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