IssueRaiser

This is a very painful problem to have.

This is a very painful problem to have. Receiving 2FA SMS programmatically is surprisingly difficult because of all the safeguards against scammers, even if your usage is legitimate. As you say, normal providers like Twilio are blacklisted so they are unreliable at best. https://clerk.chat offers the ability to receive SMS on genuine non-VOIP numbers. They are ridiculously bad at pretty much everything – terrible communication, terrible customer support, terrible reliability, terrible UX, etc. – but they can actually do this where other VOIP-based providers like Twilio can’t. They may be your least worst option. Another option that’s available is to set up an Android phone with https://ifttt.com and a genuine phone plan. Then get IFTTT to forward any SMS it receives to whatever service you need. There are open-source apps that do similar things as well – the sibling comment mentions a similar solution. It’s a pain to maintain though. I’d love it if there were a better solution out there, but I haven’t found one yet. Basically the only thing I need is a genuine phone number that will forward SMS on to a web hook.

Posted by JimDabell on Jul 28, 2023, 4:37 PM

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This is a very painful problem to have.

JimDabellJul 28, 2023, 4:37 PM

This is a very painful problem to have. Receiving 2FA SMS programmatically is surprisingly difficult because of all the safeguards against scammers, even if your usage is legitimate. As you say, normal providers like Twilio are blacklisted so they are unreliable at best. https://clerk.chat offers the ability to receive SMS on genuine non-VOIP numbers. They are ridiculously bad at pretty much everything – terrible communication, terrible customer support, terrible reliability, terrible UX, etc. – but they can actually do this where other VOIP-based providers like Twilio can’t. They may be your least worst option. Another option that’s available is to set up an Android phone with https://ifttt.com and a genuine phone plan. Then get IFTTT to forward any SMS it receives to whatever service you need. There are open-source apps that do similar things as well – the sibling comment mentions a similar solution. It’s a pain to maintain though. I’d love it if there were a better solution out there, but I haven’t found one yet. Basically the only thing I need is a genuine phone number that will forward SMS on to a web hook.

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