Con-TXT
January 19th, 2010
I’m having an issue with SMS that’s seriously twisting my panties in a knot. I have a friend, and the things she says are important to me.
It is somewhat distressing to find that a disturbing number of her messages are not reaching me. I am DROID/Verizon, she is Crackberry/nTelos. I’ve beaten Google about the search box looking for a trend on any one of or combination of those attributes so I know where to start fixing.
I can’t find a trend, and Verizon (predictably) blames nTelos. I’m at least a little distraught, probably more than I’ll admit here, and am begging you fine readers for thoughts.
Hmm. I’m not familiar with that issue, but here are some possible workarounds:
* Number your messages to each other, and reference each other’s latest message number when replying (kind of how TCP/IP does it). Annoying, but you’ll know if some messages go missing. Also could be helpful for diagnosis.
* Try sticking to really simple (I.E. no strange punctuation or characters), short (well under 100 bytes) messages and see if that helps.
* Set up a messaging server, maybe with security handled by a cookie or something (depending on the sensitivity of the messages). Both of you should have Web access; a relatively simple PHP script should be able to act as your own personal Twitter service (updating the page with the last N messages posted by either of you — colored by sender, even.)
* Use Twitter (I think there are private accounts — decide for yourself how far you trust Twitter, or not.)
Good luck — lemme know if you find out anything interesting.