Troubleshooting and Understanding MMS

[pikurasa]

The files in ~/.mms/modemmanager/ are MMS messages that are being processed. 

My understanding of the process for receving a MMS: ModemManager gets a special SMS.  It puts that raw message in a file in ~/.mms/modemmanager/ and then creates a similarly-named ".state" file with metadata for that message.  MMSDTNG then attempts to process those messages, which are mostly just a URL where the actual content can be retrieved from the carrier.  The MMS data expires after about 5 days (for Verizon) so if MMSDTNG can't get it by then, you'll never get it.  I wonder if that's what the 404 might be?  Seems like MMSDTNG should be smart enough to quit trying the expired messages, though.

This rings true for me mostly, although I do think they expire after ten-twelve days (something slightly shorter than two weeks), not five.

Things to try:
1) You'll see entries in the logs like "Using URI for request: http://63.55.99.247/servlets/mms?message...XXXXXXXXXX".  Open a shell and use curl or wget to get the contents of that URL, or see what error happens.

The funny thing, now that I look at it is that there is nothing after:

Code:

http://63.55.99.247/servlets/mms?message-id=

Also, when I look at the files in .mms/modemmanager/ there is something there after message-id, but it looks kind of like a binary with a phone number appended to the end (the phone number, FWIW, seems accurate, based on the messages I expect to be receiving.)

2) do a "ip route get 63.55.99.247" (or whatever IP is appropriate) on the phone to see if it has a viable route to the carrier's server.

I will try this later.

I will try and add more detailed logs later.

At any rate, I feel some relief knowing I have some more debugging options.