Shared consent (RCS & SMS)

RCS and SMS share one and the same consent. RCS carries no marketing preference and no suppression of its own — it reads and writes the SMS state. That's why an opt-out on either channel applies to both, in both directions. And it makes sense: to the contact, both messages arrive at the same number, in the same inbox, so a single STOP should silence both. In short: for consent purposes, think of RCS and SMS as one conversation.

One consent, both channels

The subscription attributes for SMS — _accepts_marketing_sms and _is_subscribed_sms — govern RCS as well. There is no _accepts_marketing_rcs and no _is_subscribed_rcs. Concretely:

• A contact who replies STOP over RCS is recorded as having declined SMS marketing — and the opt-out applies to SMS too.
• A contact who replies STOP over SMS is equally opted out of RCS.
• Suppressing SMS blocks both channels. There's no way to be subscribed on one and suppressed on the other.

The escalation and reactivation rules are the SMS ones, applied once for both channels — see Opt-outs & reactivation.

How it looks on the profile

Because the two channels share one consent, the Channel preferences card on the contact profile shows them as a single row — SMS / RCS — with one Subscribed checkbox and one Accepts marketing value for the pair. Editing either one changes the shared state for both channels: there is no separate RCS row to set.

In the activity record

When a contact opts in or out, Instasent logs the change against the SMS channel, even when the action happened over RCS — because there's a single underlying consent. The record keeps the origin in the method: a keyword reply over RCS is logged as an SMS-channel opt-out with an rcs: method, an SMS one with an sms: method. So the consent is shared, but you can still tell from the activity timeline which channel the contact used.

The per-channel scope of opt-outs (and why SMS and RCS always move together) is also covered in Compliance.