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A refusal is a message FireFlo declined before routing. It is recorded in cdr_rejected, and it is a different animal from a message that routed and failed.
Or, without SQL, the Refused list in the control panel — which carries the same rows with the request that produced them.

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The reasons

The SMPP column is what the customer’s submit_sm_resp carried; the HTTP column is the REST equivalent. Three of the four are vendor-specific codes in the 0x4xx range rather than SMPP standard ones — 0xC3 is the exception, being ESME_RMISSINGOPTPARAM from the specification. A customer’s SMPP client will not have names for the 0x4xx values, so quote the reason word to them, not the number. | filtered | A filter refused it | varies | Read the filter | | maxAttempts | Not a refusal. Routing gave up | nothing at submit time | Nothing is delivered |

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What every refusal has in common

Nothing was charged, or the charge was reversed. A refusal costs the customer nothing, which is why they are safe to be strict about — and why insufficientCredit is not a paradox.

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The one that is hardest to explain

A multipart content refusal happens after every segment was acknowledged.On SMPP, content is checked against a template only once the segments are reassembled — at submit time the body is still a fragment, and "Your OTP is {#var#}, valid" matches no part of a two-part message.So the customer’s client saw an OK for every segment, and the message was then dropped, refunded and recorded. There is no error they could have caught, and the receipt is the only signal.This is the normal shape for Indian-language DLT templates, where UCS-2 puts 67 characters in a segment — so a template that works in English starts failing the moment the wording is translated.

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Reading a templateNotMatched

Almost always one of four things, in descending order of how often it is actually the cause:
Whitespace is folded before matching, so runs of spaces and newlines are not the problem. Anything else — an extra full stop, a changed word, a different variable position — is.The panel’s template preview shows a sample message the template accepts. Compare it against what the customer actually sent, which is on the cdr_rejected row.
An unrecognised placeholder name — {#VAR#}, {#otp#} — loads as a generic variable rather than being dropped, and the row is reported under templates_degraded on /ops/health.It still matches, but far more loosely than intended: {#var#} accepts anything at all up to the length limit. If a template is approving messages it should not, look here first.
smsg.whitelist.max.variable bounds how much text one placeholder may stand for. A template of "Your code is {#var#}" with a 900-character body is refused even though the wording matches.
REPORT mode counts what would be refused without refusing it — whitelist_would_reject on /ops/health. Running a new account in REPORT for a day before enforcing turns this whole class of incident into a number you read at your leisure.

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insufficientCredit on an account with money on it

Not a contradiction, and the commonest surprise in prepaid operation. Credit is reserved in blocks, not per message. The block is max(smsg.balance.block.min, price × smsg.balance.block.min.messages) — twenty messages’ worth by default. A reservation tries three descending rungs: the full block, that floor, then the single message that asked. So the floor never strands money — an account spends every unit it holds.
A refusal on an account with money left is usually a refill in flight. Refills are asynchronous, so a message arriving mid-reservation can be refused; the retry succeeds. Persistent refusals with a healthy balance are a different problem — check the ledger and reserved.

Whitelisting

Approving sender IDs and wording.

Prepaid credit

Blocks, reservations and the money identity.