Use this guide when someone reports an unexpected alert or phone call that they believe came from your notification system. The steps below help you confirm whether your system was the source, identify how the recipient was added, and prevent future unwanted notifications.
Step 1: Gather details from the recipient
Start by collecting clear information about what the recipient received. This makes it easier to confirm whether the alert or call came from your notification system or another source.
- Ask for the exact phone number or caller ID that delivered the notification or call.
- If it was a text message, ask the recipient for a screenshot or the full message, including any short code or long code it came from.
- For email alerts, ask for the original message with full headers (including sender, reply-to and subject lines).
- Confirm the recipient’s phone number and email address that received the alert.
Step 2: Confirm whether your system placed the alert or call
Once you have the basic details, verify if the notification system actually sent the alert or call.
- Check the notification details and delivery logs in your system to see whether a message was sent to the reported phone number or email address.
- Search your organization’s contact list for the phone number or email to see if it is associated with any contact, and which delivery methods are active for that contact.
- If no record appears in the logs or contacts for that number or address, the alert or call may not have originated from your notification system.
Step 3: Check for third-party or external subscriptions
Sometimes, recipients are subscribed to your alerts through external services and may not appear in your primary account contact list.
- Determine whether the recipient might be subscribed via a third-party channel such as Nixle.
- If the text came from Nixle (for example, short code 888777), ask the recipient to text STOP to 888777 to opt out of those messages.
- Provide the sending phone number or caller ID and the recipient’s phone number to the person or team that manages notifications in your organization so they can investigate and remove any external subscription tied to that number.
Step 4: Look for alerts from other environments or accounts
Unexpected alerts can come from a different environment than your main production account.
- Review the alert’s email headers (sender, reply-to and subject) to understand where it originated.
- Check whether the alert may have been sent from a different environment, such as a test account or another organization instance associated with your organization or a partner.
- In that environment, search for contacts matching the recipient’s details and identify any unintended or outdated records.
- Remove unintended contacts from that environment and then monitor to verify that no further unexpected alerts are sent.
Step 5: Investigate unexpected phone calls in more depth
If the issue is specifically an unexpected phone call, further checks can help you determine if the call came from your system or another telephony source.
- Verify again in the delivery logs whether the system placed a call to the reported number at the time in question.
- Confirm which phone numbers are configured for the contact who received the call and which delivery methods are enabled.
- If there is no trace of the call in your logs and no matching contact, consider that the call may have been forwarded from another internal number or triggered by a different automation (for example, call-forwarding rules, hunt groups, or PBX/phone-carrier features).
- If possible, run a controlled test with the impacted contact: send a test notification, increase the time gap between different delivery methods, and observe which number rings and what message or prompts are played.
- If your system logs show no delivery to the reported number, the call most likely did not originate from your notification system.
Step 6: When to involve your account administrator
If you cannot identify the origin of the unexpected alert or phone call after following the steps above, involve your internal administrator or notification owner.
- Share the recipient’s details, the sending phone number or email address, and any logs or screenshots you collected.
- Ask the administrator to review additional environments or configurations tied to your organization and perform deeper investigation.
- After any changes (such as contact removal or channel unsubscribe), monitor for additional occurrences to confirm the issue is resolved.