SMS not delivered if receiver offline at sending time

[alpineduck]

Hello,

I've been using the PinePhone regularly for about half a year. Calls and SMS have been reliable, with the notable exception of the following problem that I would like to understand, and hopefully solve:

If I send a SMS to a phone that's offline, the expected behaviour of any SMS service is that the message is temporarily stored by the carrier, and when the receiver phone is later brought online, it gets the message delivered. For some reason, this isn't the case for the messages I send from the PinePhone. Messages are delivered properly when the receiver is online, but they never reach their destination if it was offline at the time of sending.

I tried with two different carriers and both 3G and 4G networks for each: the problem is systematic with the PinePhone, while messages are delivered properly when the same SIM card is used in another phone. The problem also persisted across various upgrades of the modem firmware, including ADSP.

When logged in to my user account on my carrier's website, I can see that the messages were successfully sent.

To me, this looks like the PinePhone sends its messages together with some kind of metadata meaning "do not attempt later delivery, instead discard the message if the receiver is unreachable". Could anyone confirm this? Can it be changed and how? I couldn't find any information on that matter and to be honest I'm quite surprised to be the first one to bring this up.

[fxc]

Hello,

I've been using the PinePhone regularly for about half a year. Calls and SMS have been reliable, with the notable exception of the following problem that I would like to understand, and hopefully solve:

If I send a SMS to a phone that's offline, the expected behaviour of any SMS service is that the message is temporarily stored by the carrier, and when the receiver phone is later brought online, it gets the message delivered. For some reason, this isn't the case for the messages I send from the PinePhone. Messages are delivered properly when the receiver is online, but they never reach their destination if it was offline at the time of sending.

I tried with two different carriers and both 3G and 4G networks for each: the problem is systematic with the PinePhone, while messages are delivered properly when the same SIM card is used in another phone. The problem also persisted across various upgrades of the modem firmware, including ADSP.

When logged in to my user account on my carrier's website, I can see that the messages were successfully sent.

To me, this looks like the PinePhone sends its messages together with some kind of metadata meaning "do not attempt later delivery, instead discard the message if the receiver is unreachable". Could anyone confirm this? Can it be changed and how? I couldn't find any information on that matter and to be honest I'm quite surprised to be the first one to bring this up.

I would strongly suggest you to open a bug report in the corresponding places (modemmanager, biktorgj's custom firmware or similar). This is essential to have discussions about issues being addressed in the right place and centrally collected, in contrast to distributing discussions to various social media platforms, including this forum. Even if the bug would only affect you there is no reason to not open a bug report.

[alpineduck]

I investigated further and found out that the SMS validity period which you can manually set when sending a message from nmcli is not respected, so I reported the issue to ModemManager developers: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-br...issues/737

[alaraajavamma]

I investigated further and found out that the SMS validity period which you can manually set when sending a message from nmcli is not respected, so I reported the issue to ModemManager developers: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-br...issues/737

This works in my Pinephones just like it should.
SMS or MMS is stored by carrier and when modem boots it will fetch the message and receives it.

Can you check do you see the messages when you use
mmcli -m any --messaging-list-sms

[alpineduck]

I don't have any problem with receiving messages on the PinePhone, this works as intended. The issue affects messages sent from the PinePhone to any other phones, when these are offline.

[alaraajavamma]

I don't have any problem with receiving messages on the PinePhone, this works as intended. The issue affects messages sent from the PinePhone to any other phones, when these are offline.

Sorry I wrote it badly.

I shutdown my Pinephone and lets call it PP1.
I have also another Pinephone lets call it PP2.
I will send SMS from PP2 to PP1 while PP1 is powered down.
I boot my PP1 and when modem comes alive it will receive the SMS which was send when the device was offline.

[alpineduck]

It also works for me if the receiver is connected to the network in the following minutes, but it doesn't if it's hours later. I didn't make tests of intermediate durations to tell what actual validity period is being used. Possibly 5 minutes if the default value for TP-VP is 0 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.40#Relative_format).

[alpineduck]

Update on this issue:

Contrary to my expectations, it seems to be a Phosh/Chatty bug.

I thought it was a more general problem because the tests I made using mmcli on the command line weren't successful either, but I may not have set the proper command line options, or mmcli may use options set by Chatty, I didn't take time to investigate this yet.

Anyway, I did tests with sxmo and Plasma Mobile, and both successfully delivered my messages on the following day, while Chatty (on either Phosh or Gnome Mobile) didn't.

I'm waiting for my account to be validated in order to be able to report a bug on https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty...

[alpineduck]

Issue opened: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/issues/831

[alaraajavamma]

I just tried and after 30 minutes I did receive the sms as usual.

Postmarket OS edge with latest updates
OG PP Beta edition
BIktorjgs 0.72 firmware with 03 something ADSP