DND registry: definition and how it works
Published and updated
A DND (Do Not Disturb) registry is a national list of phone numbers whose owners have opted out of promotional calls and texts, which senders and operators must check before sending marketing.
How it works
Many countries run an opt-out list at national level rather than leaving it to each sender. The best known for SMS is India's, where the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India runs customer preference registration as part of its unsolicited commercial communication framework. A subscriber can block all promotional messages or choose categories, and the operators scrub promotional traffic against those preferences before delivering it. Since the 2018 regulations the preferences live on the operators' shared ledger alongside sender registrations.
The critical distinction is promotional versus transactional. A DND registration blocks marketing. It does not block a one time passcode the subscriber requested, an order confirmation, or a service alert, and India's rules explicitly route those through registered transactional and service headers instead. Getting the classification wrong, such as slipping an offer into a transactional template, is what gets a sender's header suspended.
Other countries have equivalents with different scopes. Nigeria's regulator runs a DND short code that subscribers activate; the United States has a Do Not Call registry aimed at telemarketing calls rather than texts, with texting governed mainly by consent under the TCPA; several European countries run Robinson lists for marketing.
For a sender the practice is the same everywhere: hold your own consent records, and where a national list exists, scrub marketing against it as well.
- TRAI runs customer preference registration under its unsolicited commercial communication framework and caps an ordinary SIM at one hundred SMS per day. trai.gov.in, checked on September 4, 2026
How this applies with textbee
A textbee message from an Indian SIM shows the phone number rather than a registered header, so it is outside the DLT scrubbing system, and the daily SIM cap applies. That suits transactional and reply-based messages. Marketing to Indian numbers still has to respect DND preferences, which means checking your own consent list and not sending promotions to people who never asked.
Related terms
- DLT registration: DLT registration is the Indian requirement that any business sending commercial or transactional SMS register itself, its sender headers and its message templates on a distributed ledger run by the telecom operators, under TRAI rules.
- Opt-in: Opt-in is the recipient's recorded agreement to receive text messages from you, collected before the first message and kept as proof, with a higher written standard for marketing.
- TCPA: The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is the United States law, implemented by the FCC in 47 CFR 64.1200, that requires prior express consent before automated calls or texts and written consent before marketing ones.
- A2P and P2P messaging: P2P is a text one person sends to another; A2P is a text an application sends to a person, and carriers apply different rules, filters and prices to each.
Sources
- DND registry, trai.gov.in, checked on September 4, 2026