Honour opt-out replies on outbound WhatsApp campaigns

[achiya-automation]

The problem

A contact who replies "stop" / "unsubscribe" to a WhatsApp campaign keeps receiving the next one. Chatwoot has no concept of an opted-out contact — searching the codebase for opt_out returns nothing, and the only related matches for unsubscribe are webhook teardown for Instagram/Facebook/Twitter, not recipient opt-out.

Why it matters commercially

This is not a nicety. Meta's quality rating is computed from block reasons over a rolling 7-day window, and "Spam" / "Didn't sign up" are the two most damaging. Meta's own guidance is explicit: provide a clear way to opt out in the message. A business that keeps messaging someone who asked to stop gets its number rated down, then throttled, then disabled — and Chatwoot is the tool that sent those messages.

For an operator running campaigns from Chatwoot today, the only workaround is to watch inbound replies by hand and remove contacts manually. That does not scale past a few hundred contacts, and one miss costs the number.

What it would take

Roughly: a keyword match on inbound messages, a suppressed flag on the contact, and a check in the campaign send path. Meta's 131050 error code ("user is not accepting marketing") should set the same flag.

Two details worth getting right, from running this in production:

• Match whole words, not substrings. In Hebrew, "הסרטון" (the video) contains "הסר" (remove). Substring matching silently suppresses people who were interested.
• Distinguish refusal from saturation. Meta's 131049 is an adaptive per-user cap, not a refusal — it relaxes over time and is waived inside an open 24h service window. Treating it as an opt-out permanently discards leads who never objected to anything.

Offer

I've implemented this in an MIT-licensed add-on (chatwoot-power-tools, see docs/meta-compliance.md) and I'd be glad to write a native Rails/Vue PR for core instead, in whatever shape you'd prefer. Happy to scope it down to just the English keyword set if the bilingual matching is out of scope.