How are duplicate phone numbers handled?

By default, Mobile Message prevents duplicate phone numbers across your account. This keeps your contact lists clean and ensures each number is treated as a single, unique recipient.

Default behaviour

When duplicate prevention is active (the default):

• If the same phone number appears multiple times in a spreadsheet, it will only be imported once
• When importing numbers that already exist in your account, you can choose to skip or overwrite the existing contact
• If you send a message to multiple lists and the same contact appears in more than one list, they will only receive the message once

This approach prevents accidental double sends and keeps your contact data tidy.

Allowing duplicate contact numbers

If your use case requires the same phone number to exist as multiple separate contacts, you can enable the Allow duplicate contact numbers setting.

To enable it: go to Settings > My Profile and turn on Allow duplicate contact numbers. This setting is off by default.

What changes when this setting is enabled

Importing contacts: A third option appears when handling duplicates during import — Allow duplicate. Selecting this creates a new contact entry for the imported number even if that number already exists in your account. The existing contact is left unchanged.

Sending to multiple lists: If the same number exists as multiple contacts across your selected lists, each matching contact will receive the message separately. This means a single number could receive more than one copy of the message.

Pasting numbers: When sending by pasting phone numbers directly, duplicates are always removed regardless of this setting. Each number will only be sent to once.

Which setting should I use?

For most accounts, the default (duplicates prevented) is the right choice. It avoids double charges and ensures clean, predictable sending behaviour.

Enable Allow duplicate contact numbers only if you intentionally need the same number stored as separate contacts — for example, to represent different people or records that happen to share a number.