Outbound message to new numbers are not sending, on chat window its showing as sent (two ticks)

[sreenathtk]

I'm seeing an issue when sending WhatsApp messages to new numbers.

When I send a message to a new WhatsApp number using the API, the chat window shows the message as sent, but it is never received on the recipient's WhatsApp.

To test further, I manually sent a message from the recipient's WhatsApp number to the number used to start the API session. After that initial message, sending messages through the API started working correctly.

I then repeated the test with another WhatsApp number that had no previous chat history, and I encountered the same issue.😢

[rmyndharis]

Hi @sreenathtk — exact same symptom as a known issue we're tracking: #830 — First message to a brand-new contact sometimes never arrives.

Your observation ("once the recipient sent a message to my session number first, subsequent sends started working") is the textbook signature of WhatsApp's server-side reach-out trust policy: the first message to a never-contacted number is dropped at delivery (after the API has already returned success), and the moment there's any inbound from that number the policy stops applying.

Not something OpenWA can fully fix on its own — but we're collecting repros and shipping mitigations in #830. If you can post your OpenWA version, engine, hosting setup, and account age using the repro template there, that'd really help. Closing this discussion in favour of the tracking issue. 🙂