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Lookup answers questions about a recipient before you spend anything sending to them. Give it a phone number and it tells you what the number is: the network serving it, the country, whether it has moved network, and what kind of line it is. Give it an email address and it tells you whether the address will accept mail.

Both were reachable only with an API key on an allowlisted organization. They are now open to every workspace, in the dashboard and on the public API.

The problem it solves is spending on a recipient who was never reachable. A number that turns out to be a disconnected landline still costs a send attempt; an address with a typo in the domain costs a bounce and a small dent in your sending reputation. Checking first is a smaller cost than either.

What's new

• Two pages in the dashboard. Lookup checks one number or one address at a time and shows the whole answer, which is the fastest way to see what a lookup returns before writing any code. Reachable by any member whose role grants lookup access.
• The number lookup has a free base tier and paid extras. The base answer always runs: country, serving network, issuing network, ported flag, coarse line type. Name classification, porting, presence, roaming, sim_swap or score in type to add more, and each is billed only when it is actually delivered. A property that could not be answered comes back with a status and costs nothing.
• The email lookup gives you one field to decide on. result is valid, neutral, risky, undeliverable or typo, with reason explaining an undeliverable verdict and did_you_mean carrying the correction for a typo. delivery_confidence runs 0–100 alongside it.
• Typed in every SDK, and on the CLI. lookup.phone_number and lookup.email are methods in the Go, TypeScript, Python and PHP SDKs, each with a worked example, plus bird lookup phone-number and bird lookup email.
• A retry cannot bill twice. Send an Idempotency-Key and a repeated request replays the stored answer instead of buying a second lookup.

An API key needs the lookup scope, and lookups draw on their own lookup rate-limit bucket rather than sharing your general write budget. Lookup overview explains what each request costs, and the phone number and email address guides cover every field.

Verify's Bird-managed sender is now a named choice between two identities, set per channel and per country. Bird Verify puts the Bird name in front of your users. Authifly is a standalone verification brand that names no platform vendor, so nothing about your delivery infrastructure is visible to the person receiving the code.

The choice reaches every channel that has a sender. On email it decides the from-address and the branding in the body. On SMS it decides the alphanumeric sender ID, in the countries that permit one. On WhatsApp it decides which Bird-managed business number the message comes from. Telegram is unaffected: its codes come from Telegram's own verified account, which is not ours to brand.

What changed for existing configurations

Nothing, if you had already sent a passcode. Every configuration that existed before this release was pinned to Authifly, which is what it was already sending as, so no recipient sees a different sender than they did last week.

Two cases did move to Bird Verify, because they had no stored sender to keep: a workspace with no Verify configuration at all, and a send in a workspace with several configurations that did not name which one to use. If either describes you and you want Authifly, select it on the Channels tab.

Using it

Open the Channels tab and pick an identity on the Email, SMS, or WhatsApp row. To override it for one destination, set a sender on that country in country configuration. A per-country choice wins over the channel default for recipients there.

Full detail, including what each channel shows in countries that require a short code or a local number: Senders and branding.

The numbers your workspace sends from are now yours to manage over the API. Search what is on sale in a country, order one, and release it when you are done, without opening the dashboard.

Buying a number was a dashboard task, which meant provisioning could not be part of anything automated: onboarding a customer onto their own number, or giving a new region its own local presence, ended at a form somebody had to fill in. These are the same operations the dashboard has been using, now published.

What's new

• Search, scoped to a country. GET /v1/numbers/available takes a country_code and narrows from there by type, capability, or a prefix of national digits. Bird's own stock pages normally; the last page can include what a carrier is offering live.
• Buying is an order you can follow. POST /v1/numbers/orders usually completes inside the request and hands back the number. One that has to wait on a carrier comes back still running, and GET /v1/numbers/orders/{order_id} polls it to completed or failed. Send an Idempotency-Key and a retry cannot buy twice.
• Read and release what is allocated to you. GET /v1/numbers lists your numbers with their type, capabilities, and status; DELETE /v1/numbers/{number_id} releases a dedicated one and stops its monthly charge.
• Typed in every SDK. numbers.available.list, numbers.orders.create, numbers.list and numbers.release are methods in the Go, TypeScript, Python, and PHP SDKs, each with a worked example.

An API key needs the new numbers scope, and the first purchase in an organization needs identity verification. Buy and release a number walks the whole flow, and Numbers overview explains what the fields on a number mean.

Keyword configuration is now open to every workspace, and on the public API alongside it.

Bird has always recognised and honoured a STOP on your numbers with no setup on your side, and that has not changed. What is new is that you can see exactly which keywords it recognises where, and make the replies say your name instead of ours.

Getting started

• Opt-outs and keywords

What's available

• See what applies: list the rules for a country, or for one of your numbers in the order they are applied, including what a sender messaging from elsewhere gets.
• Replace a reply: override Bird's opt-out, opt-in, or help wording for a country. Your rule keeps Bird's keywords unless you add more, including keywords Bird adds later, so your compliance answer does not go stale.
• Campaign keywords: add custom keywords of your own with the reply you write.
• Answer from your own system: switch Bird's auto-reply off for a rule while the opt-out itself keeps being honoured.
• Everywhere you build: the dashboard, the API, the Go, TypeScript, Python, and PHP SDKs, bird sms keyword-rules on the CLI, and the matching MCP tools.

What an opt-out or opt-in keyword does is fixed and cannot be reassigned. Coverage is per country: listing the rules for a country shows what is recognised there, and where nothing is, no keyword is matched and no opt-out is recorded, so you are responsible for honouring opt-outs there yourself.

Two parts of SMS that were dashboard-only are now on the public API, with typed SDK methods, bird CLI commands, and MCP tools for each.

Getting started

• SMS stats API
• Opt-outs and keywords

What's available

• Statistics: the aggregate summary, the daily and hourly series, and breakdowns by destination country, carrier, originator, category, status, and failure reason, plus counts of what your numbers received, by country, operator, and number. The same aggregation the Metrics dashboard reads.
• Suppressions: list who your senders may not message and why, check one subscriber before sending to them, and add or end a suppression of your own. A send to a suppressed pair is refused with SMSRecipientSuppressed rather than going out.
• Message timeline: a message's lifecycle events are now a public read, alongside the message itself.
• Everywhere you build: the API, the Go, TypeScript, Python, and PHP SDKs, bird sms stats, bird sms suppressions, and bird sms list-events on the CLI, and the matching MCP tools.