Sending short links in SMS to India

India’s telecom regulator (TRAI) requires that any link in a commercial SMS be whitelisted on the carrier’s DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platform before it’s delivered — unwhitelisted links are silently blocked by the carrier. If you send marketing or transactional SMS to Indian numbers, this page explains what that means for the short links you build with MicroURL.

A shared mirl.cc link won’t work in SMS to India

Carriers block links from generic public shorteners in commercial SMS, because nothing about mirl.cc/abc123 identifies which business sent it. This isn’t a MicroURL limitation to fix — it’s how the regulation defines a compliant sender link. A link on a domain that’s identifiably yours is the only kind that can be whitelisted.

If you need to send SMS to India, use a custom domain (e.g. links.yourcompany.com) for those links instead of the shared domain.

Whitelisting is a one-time, self-service step

Whitelisting happens once per domain, not once per link. As the Principal Entity (the business registered to send the SMS), you log into your own telecom operator’s DLT portal (e.g. Jio TrueConnect, Airtel DLT Connect, Vi VILPower) and whitelist your domain — for example https://links.yourcompany.com/ as a static prefix. Every short link you create under that domain afterward is automatically covered; you don’t need to re-register per link.

This is free and self-service, and it has to be done by you, on your own PE account — it requires your own login and OTP, so it isn’t something MicroURL (or any third party) can do on your behalf.

One thing that makes this simpler: MicroURL’s short links are always a bare https://yourdomain.com/slug with no query string attached, which is the cleanest possible shape to whitelist — there’s no dynamic-suffix complexity to account for.

What MicroURL does and doesn’t do here

• We provide the custom-domain infrastructure your whitelisted link needs to live on.
• We don’t register, file, or submit anything to any DLT platform on your behalf.
• We don’t guarantee message delivery — that depends on your own PE/Telemarketer registration and DLT whitelisting being correctly in place.

Not legal advice

This page is a plain-language summary to help you plan, not legal advice, and TRAI’s rules have changed multiple times in the past two years. For authoritative, current guidance and your own compliance obligations, consult trai.gov.in and your own counsel.

Questions

Email [email protected].