The smb_message_echoes webhook
smb_message_echoes delivers what your team sends from the WhatsApp Business app. It exists only on Coexistence numbers, because only they have a human sending from the phone as well as software sending from the API.
- What the human sent, delivered to software
- Only on Coexistence numbers
- Ignoring it causes double replies
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Field that reports a human's outbound message to your system.
Message path fields in total: this one and messages.
Equivalent on a number onboarded without Coexistence.
Why does this field exist at all?
Because Coexistence creates a situation the API was not originally built for: two things sending from one number.
On an ordinary Cloud API number, software is the only sender, so there is nothing to report. On a Coexistence number the team is still answering from the phone, and without a way to see that, software would be operating blind about half of every conversation.
The echo closes that. When someone types a reply in the WhatsApp Business app, it arrives at your endpoint as an event, with the same shape as an inbound message but marked as outbound from the business.
What breaks if you ignore it?
The customer gets answered twice, and it looks careless.
The usual sequence is that a customer asks something at eight in the morning, a person picks it up on the phone within a minute, and an automation that never saw that reply answers the same question three minutes later. From the customer's side that is one business that does not know what it already said.
Handling it is not complicated. Record the echo against the conversation exactly as you would an inbound message, and check for recent activity before sending. What makes this bite is that it is invisible in testing, because a test conversation has no human answering it.
Common mistakes
- Treating echoes as noise and dropping them. They are the only signal that a human already replied.
- Assuming the field exists on every number. It is specific to Coexistence.
- Testing without a human in the loop, which is the one scenario where the problem never appears.
EasyCoexistence routes both message path fields, this one and messages, straight from Meta to your endpoint. Neither passes through us.
Frequently asked questions
Do echoes include media?
They report what was sent, including references to media, in the same shape as inbound messages.
Does this exist on a normal Cloud API number?
No. Without Coexistence there is no human sending from an app, so there is nothing to echo.
Can I turn it off?
It comes with the message path. Routing that path to your endpoint includes it, and ignoring it in code is a choice with consequences.
Does it cost anything?
No. It is a webhook event, not a message send.
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