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Ask HN: How Do Texts (SMS) Work? And Who's Wrong: Me or T-Mobile?

5 points by gareim ↗ HN
I ask this because my girlfriend often gets texts from me that are merged with texts from up to a year ago. This, combined with her not receiving my texts often, frustrates me.

The old texts that are merged into the new ones have been deleted off our phones for a long time now. So either our phones are keeping copies despite us deleting them (I have a Nokia E5, she a T-Mobile Sidekick) or T-Mobile is keeping copies and is somehow screwing up.

I don't know how to figure out whose fault it is since I know little of SMS. And T-Mobile CSRs are usually too incompetent for me to put up with ("Have you tried turning off the phone?").

Does anyone have any ideas?

3 comments

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blakdawg
I think it's more likely the problem is in your phone(s), not T-Mobile's network, because if it was in the network chances are many people would experience this problem.

Easiest way to troubleshoot would be for one of you to move your SIM to a different phone for a few days and see if the problem persists.

It may not be an issue of "keeping copies" so much as reusing the same space in memory, which every device does.

It's pretty easy to imagine a bug that would result in an "end of message" flag being not written or not read/recognized, leading to old data being presented as new data. That's basically the same "buffer overrun" problem that plagues a lot of software developers worldwide. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow . The problem can be solved, but first someone must believe that it exists.

gareim
Thanks for the explanation! It makes a lot of sense and sounds pretty probable to me. If it's a buffer overflow problem, I'd imagine it would affect more than just one Android handset.

It took a few searches, but I found a bug report opened last year detailing just this and it seems to be an Android problem: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17769

It's a little disheartening to see the problem might still persist on ICS and also that no dev has replied to this in a year.

And if it is a buffer overflow, does that explain why sometimes (actually, a lot of times) she doesn't receive my texts?

timmm
All major carriers archive text messages but they also delete them after (usually) 3 months or so due to the ridiculous volume.