When you create an SMS, TapMango shows a segment count and a character count. A longer message is split into segments, and each segment counts toward your SMS usage and billing.
What counts toward a segment
- More than 160 standard characters needs more than one segment.
- Special tags can expand to more characters than they show in the editor.
- Emoji and other special characters cut the space in a segment about in half, because the whole message uses a larger character set.
Keep the message concise, skip emoji, and be careful with special tags if you want to stay in a single segment.
Why a text can be more than one segment
Each text has a size limit. For a standard message, that limit is 160 characters. Carriers still count a long text as multiple messages, and TapMango follows those same rules. A segment is one of those pieces. The more characters you use, the more segments are sent.
Emoji and special characters
A standard message uses GSM-7. That set covers most English, French, Spanish, and German letters. The full GSM-7 character set is listed on Wikipedia.
If the message includes any character outside that set, including emoji, the whole message uses UCS-2. Every character then takes more than twice the space, so you have 70 characters per segment instead of 160.
Characters you can type
These counts already subtract the unsubscribe line at the end of the message.
| Segments | Standard characters (GSM-7) | Special characters (UCS-2) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 141 | 51 |
| 2 | 287 | 115 |
| 3 | 440 | 182 |
Unsubscribe message
TapMango adds an unsubscribe message to the end of every SMS. It uses 19 characters. It is required on marketing SMS and cannot be changed.
More than one segment
When a message uses more than one segment, each later segment holds 153 standard characters, or 67 characters when the message includes special characters or emoji. A few characters are reserved so the phone can join the segments in order.
Account limit
By default, a TapMango account can send up to 3 segments per text message. To raise that limit, contact TapMango support.
If you regularly need 4 or more segments, consider Picture Messaging (MMS). MMS does not use the same segment limits.
If you have any questions, talk to us and we'll be happy to help.
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