How messages reach your assistant

Between a customer pressing send and your assistant replying, a message is matched to your account, matched to a conversation, stored, and only then answered. Knowing that order explains most of the surprises: why an old message arrived but got no reply, why a reply left from a different number, and why a late answer is refused.

From the customer’s phone to your inbox

1. The customer sends a WhatsApp message to your business number.
2. Meta delivers it to OMAI as a signed notification. A delivery whose signature does not verify is rejected outright.
3. OMAI matches the business number that received the message to exactly one organization.
4. A delivery Meta has already sent is recognised by the message’s own WhatsApp id, so a retry never creates a second copy.
5. If the account is suspended or pending deletion, the delivery is acknowledged and nothing at all is stored.
6. A message that appears to come from one of your own connected numbers is discarded — this is what stops the assistant answering itself.
7. The contact and the conversation are found or created, and the message is stored with the time the customer actually sent it.
8. The conversation’s unread count goes up, and — only if the assistant is allowed to answer this conversation — an answer is queued.

How a message finds your account

• Routing is by the business number that received the message, never by the sender.
• Meta’s stable phone number id is tried first, because it identifies one number unambiguously. If that finds nothing, the number in international format is used instead.
• The match is scoped to the provider, so a Meta number and a Twilio number can never be confused with each other.
• If a routing key somehow points at connections in more than one organization, OMAI stops and drops the message rather than deliver it to the wrong account.
• If nothing matches at all, the message is dropped and recorded internally as unrouted.

How a message joins a conversation

• The contact is matched by phone number within your organization, and created the first time that number writes.
• The most recent conversation for that contact that is not Resolved or Archived is reused. If there is none, a new conversation is created.
• A new conversation records the number it arrived on, copies the assistant state from your account settings, and takes its language from the text of the first message.
• The stored time is the customer’s send time, not the time OMAI received the delivery. Meta replays recent messages when a number that also lives on your phone is first connected, and using the real send time is what keeps the assistant from answering days-old chatter.
• On a number that also runs in the WhatsApp Business app, a message you send from the phone arrives here too. It is stored as your outgoing message, labelled Owner (from phone), and never triggers an AI reply.

When the assistant does not answer

A paused assistant does not mean a lost message. In almost every case the message is stored and visible in the inbox — only the automatic reply is withheld, so you can answer yourself. The two exceptions are at the bottom of the table, and in both of them the message never enters the product.

The 24-hour reply window

WhatsApp lets a business send a free-form message only within 24 hours of the customer’s last message to it. This is Meta’s rule, not OMAI’s, and it applies to your typed replies exactly as it applies to the assistant.

• The window is measured from the customer’s most recent inbound message. A contact who has never written to you has no open window at all.
• OMAI checks the window twice: before it spends anything generating an answer, and again at the moment of sending.
• When the window has closed, the composer is replaced with The 24-hour window has closed and a template picker.
• An answer that was queued while the window was open but only runs after it closed is dropped without being sent, and without using one of your included AI answers.

Approved templates are the way to write outside the window — they deliberately bypass it. A template has to be approved by WhatsApp before you can use it; see message templates.

Delivery states on a message

Delivery updates arrive as their own notifications after the message has left, and are matched to it by the id WhatsApp gave it. A message can therefore sit on Sent for a while and then move to Delivered without anything being wrong.

When a send fails

• The message stays in the conversation and is marked Failed — nothing vanishes, so you can see exactly what was attempted.
• The reason reported by the provider is stored on the message, and when Meta rejects a message after accepting it, Meta’s own error code and title are stored too.
• A failed send is not retried automatically. Sending again is a deliberate action you take.
• An answer that never went out does not consume one of your plan’s included AI answers.
• If the failure is “this number isn’t connected”, the problem is the connection, not the message — see connection states and what each one means.

Limits worth knowing