Link Leads Blog · September 2, 2026
A carrier can filter a STOP reply out of your inbox. It can't remove that number from your CRM, your dialer, or next month's re-upload. That part is on you, and it's the part most agents get wrong.
Texting an aged list is opt-out messaging, not opt-in — the record never asked to hear from you, so the entire legal footing rests on giving every recipient a clean, working way to stop it and honoring that request the moment it arrives. Miss one, and it isn't a customer-service problem. A single ignored STOP followed by even one more text can be the basis of a TCPA claim, and plaintiffs' firms specifically look for exactly this pattern: a number that opted out and then got texted again. The fix costs nothing and takes minutes to build. Not building it is the expensive part.
The CTIA's short code and 10DLC guidelines set a standard keyword list every registered campaign has to recognize, case-insensitive, as a complete message with nothing else in the body:
Most 10DLC-registered texting platforms (see 10DLC registration for insurance agents for the campaign setup itself) auto-handle STOP at the carrier level and will block further sends to that number on their own network. That's the floor, not the whole job — it stops that one number on that one platform. It does nothing about the same number sitting in your CRM's contact list, your dialer's call queue, or a fresh CSV export three weeks from now.
Carrier-level blocking and your own suppression list are two different systems, and only one of them is fully under your control. Build a standing "do not contact" list — a single table with phone number, the date of the opt-out, and the keyword received — and check every outbound send, dial, and re-upload against it before anything goes out. Concretely:
If a complaint ever comes in, "we stopped texting them" isn't enough — you need to show when. Log the phone number, the exact keyword text, the timestamp, and the campaign or batch it came from, and keep that record for as long as you'd keep any other compliance log — most agencies default to several years given the TCPA's statute of limitations. This is the same discipline as the batch tracking covered in the cost-per-contact spreadsheet — one more column, tied to the same batch ID, turns a defensive record into something you already had the habit of keeping.
The failure pattern is almost always the same three mistakes:
Opt-out handling manages the numbers that tell you to stop. It doesn't catch the landlines, disconnected numbers, and DNC-registered contacts that shouldn't have been dialed or texted in the first place — that's a separate scrub, run before the first send, not after complaints start. The tool we point buyers at for that pass is Landline Remover (an affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up) — upload the CSV and it strips landlines and DNC-listed numbers in one pass, so the file you're building a suppression list on top of is clean to begin with. The full walkthrough is in how to DNC scrub an aged lead list.
This is a practical workflow guide, not legal advice. TCPA, CTIA carrier guidelines, and state-level texting rules change and carry real penalties — confirm your platform's opt-out handling and your own suppression process with counsel familiar with telemarketing law before you scale a texting campaign.
Link Leads sells SMS and email lead lists at a flat $0.012 per lead, minimum order 5,000 leads ($60), filterable by state and age band, deduped and delivered as an instant CSV. Build an order in the order builder, or pull a free 100-row sample before you commit to a batch.