Help Messaging Help

[RxMonkey]

Hello All,

I have a Galaxy S7 Edge

I really hope you can help. I tried to send my wife a pdf file through messaging. (I know I'm an idiot). It failed to send. For the past 3-4 days it tries about every 2 to 5 minutes to send it again, sending my wife and I an failed to send text. I have hundreds of these messages a day.

I tried to clear the phone cache and it stopped for a day or so.
I did a complete factory wipe and it starts trying to resend immediately upon starting up.

Other than smashing it with a hammer and buying an iPhone.... what can I do?

 

[Hadron]

If you did a complete factory reset and it's still telling you this then there are two possibilities:
1) you also did an extremely thorough backup and restored the problem after the reset
2) the problem is in your carrier's network now and not in your phone.
It's curious that it's sending "failed to send" texts to your wife, and that it's sending texts to you: why would the phone send you a text rather than just pop up a notification? That sounds like something coming from your carrier to me - does the wording of those texts give any clues? If you put your phone in airplane mode does she still get them? If so that would prove that the problem was with your carrier rather than the phone, and you'd need to speak to them (or wait for the system to give up, but that could take 2 weeks).

 

[RxMonkey]

If you did a complete factory reset and it's still telling you this then there are two possibilities:
1) you also did an extremely thorough backup and restored the problem after the reset
2) the problem is in your carrier's network now and not in your phone.
It's curious that it's sending "failed to send" texts to your wife, and that it's sending texts to you: why would the phone send you a text rather than just pop up a notification? That sounds like something coming from your carrier to me - does the wording of those texts give any clues? If you put your phone in airplane mode does she still get them? If so that would prove that the problem was with your carrier rather than the phone, and you'd need to speak to them (or wait for the system to give up, but that could take 2 weeks).

Thank you SOOO much! This is what I was looking for some troubleshooting advice. I didn't restore anything after backup except my contacts from the SIM. Maybe that is what kept it around.

I'm not sure about the notifications. It's like a text in that it's in the messaging app, it has a bubble like a text that is white with a pdf symbol on the side the name of the pdf beside it and outside the bubble next to it is a exclamation point and under it it says 'failed' and sometimes it says 'canceled'.

I'm stunned that a factory wipe wouldn't correct the problem. Given that it originated on my phone I wouldn't think it would help to wipe her phone. I get what you're saying in that it's probably on the network for some reason. I'll try to put it in airplane mode to see if it is indeed the network. So you think it'll eventually quit trying? Maybe I can call AT&T. I'm beyond frustrated with it at this point.

 

[Mikestony]

I think I'm with @Hadron on the carrier bit. Must be a glitch with the carrier wanting to send it and it's in limbo.
Very odd that it did the same thing after a factory reset, and not restoring anything (besides contacts).

I'd be calling AT&T and asking if they can do something about it.

Very odd

 

[Hadron]

When you send an SMS (and I expect MMS is the same) the network will continue to try to deliver it up to some maximum period, which is usually 7-14 days but depends on the carrier. That's why I think that if the problem is with the carrier it will eventually stop.

No, I don't think that wiping your wife's phone would serve any purpose at all.

I don't know the Samsung messaging app, but what you described sounds a lot like a typical outgoing message with delivery status reporting turned on. TBH I've never tried wiping a phone while a message is still undelivered, so not sure how I'd expect that to be reported in that case. Is what she sees on her phone similar, or does she get say a message to say that she's received something from you but the download has failed (for example)?

 

[svim]

Texting is not a good medium to send attachments. With things like image and video files they automatically get scaled down in resolution if the original is too large (and by too large it varies from carrier to carrier). Most have limitations to one MB per file. If you're using a service like WhatsApp you can get by with much larger files but it's always a matter of both parties must be using WhatsApp). But MMS is a strictly low bandwidth interaction. A PDF is essentially a postscript file, it's a proprietary file type where scaling down the resolution is more involved than with a jpg or a mp4 file.
http://www.gsmarena.com/glossary.php3?term=mms
If you want to know the exact number just do an online search for your carrier with 'mms file attachment limit', and if you wife is using a different carrier so the same and then the smallest number is the maximum file size.

You do have other options though. You can use email, which does have limitations but are much larger:
https://www.outlook-apps.com/maximum-email-size/

If you don't want to use email and you have a Dropbox, or Google Drive, or MS OneDrive, or one of the other popular online storage services you can upload your file to your account and then just text the link for that file to your wife.

If you have a file under ten MB in size and it needs to be securely transferred, use Secureshare:
https://securesha.re/
All transfers are encrypted (with the keys never stored so if some government agency wants them, there's nothing to be given up), and all items are deleted when they are seven days old (or less if you opt for that).