Description of the problem.
Suppose my phone number is +33699009900 (of course it’s not the real one) and that I communicate with someone called Alice via the “chats” software provided with PureOS. Her SMS come to me in the discussion called “Alice”. But her MMS comes to me in another discussion called “+33699009900 and Alice”.
What I think is the source of the problem, and why I think so.
I think my Librem 5 doesn’t understand that I am, or rather that it is, +33699009900. In addition to the initial problem, I have two other reasons for thinking this.
First of all, when I go to settings → Mobile → Modem Details, I don’t find any telephone number there. I have no more success with the mmcli -m any command.
Secondly, if I post an SMS or MMS in the discussion titled “+33699009900 and Alice”, I receive my own message, which is found in duplicate in this same discussion (and not in the one titled “Alice”, even for SMS).
What I tried and didn’t work.
In the MMS Carrier Settings, I completed the “your modem’s phone number” field with my telephone number, but after pressing the “apply” button, if I go back to look, the field is empty again.
I then manually modified the DefaultModemNumber line in the ~/.mms/modemmanager/mms file (from DefaultModemNumber=NULL to DefaultModemNumber=+33699009900), but after rebooting the “Chats” application refuses to send MMS (and the MMS Carrier Settings can no longer be modified via the application, and instead of my parameters I can read “http://carriermmsc.invalid” or even “apn.invalid”).
Do all SMS messages appear in a standard messaging thread and all MMS messages appear in a group thread? I had a similar experience when someone initiated a new chat thread with an MMS, but not when initiated with an SMS. This may be something to test after you revert any carrier/modem settings to their previously working values.
For example:
Case 1: MMS initiation
Them: sent initial MMS image
L5: received image in MMS group message i.e. “+33699009900 and Alice”
Them: sent SMS
L5: received SMS in a “normal” non-group message thread
Them: sent MMS image
L5: received image in “normal” message thread
…
Case 2: SMS initiation
Them: sent initial SMS
L5: received SMS in normal message thread
Them: sent MMS image
L5: received image in normal message thread
…
Hm. I think I’d need more information about your carrier to be of more help. This may not he helpful for your case, but I have a US-based phone with Purism’s mobile data plan, offered via T-Mobile. I had to configure the MMSC and APN as follows:
It has been a long time since I set this up, but I recall having some unexpected behavior with MMS without this configuration.
I have a subscription with a French mobile telephone operator, here are the settings it gives on its site (which obviously is in French, but the table with the information that interests us should be easily understandable), you must refer to the “Offre 4G+/5G” column: Paramétrages SMS, MMS, Internet et modem - Réglo Mobile.
I configured the MMSC, the APN and the proxy as follows:
I think the missing “own number” information that is causing problems. I have the issue too, just as you describe it, with MMS always arriving in another conversation. However in my case I am still so happy to see MMS arriving at all, I don’t care which conversation they appear in as long as they do arrive
Based on earlier discussions about this I think the reason why this only happens to some users and not others, is that the Chatty app tries to fetch the own number info from the SIM card, but depending on your SIM card (and/or mobile network maybe) that may not work. When the own number is not known to Chatty, we get this behavior that MMS appear in another conversation.
So it should be possible to solve by manually entering the own number in a setting somewhere. Apparently that is buggy as you tried it and it did not work, we should find and fix the bug(s).
Who is this “we” you are talking about? The community, the participants in this thread, the developers? I’m not even sure that the phone number setting is as useful as I think it is, and assuming that there is indeed a bug, and that it has not already been taken into account, can I report it myself, and if so, where? On https://tracker.pureos.net, or elsewhere?
I tried to create an account on the gitlab instance “source.puri.sm”, but I couldn’t. If I understood correctly I should receive an email with a validation link, but nothing ever reached me (obviously I looked in my spam). If anyone ever has the same problem as I described in this thread, I would be very grateful if they would create an issue about it.
It is indeed a big problem for new (young) users like my 16 years old son to be able to receive mms from friends without third party app. (I did not want to give him an Android or iphone…)
You can at least change the source code locally, like this:
# Get the source code for the chatty package
apt-get source chatty
cd chatty-0.7.3/
# .. make your changes in .c files ...
sudo apt-get build-dep chatty
# Build the package with your modifications
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b
cd ..
# installed your modified package
sudo dpkg --install chatty*.deb
To get the needed changes into the official repo, maybe you could write a comment in the issue you linked to, and maybe even create a merge request there?
Good idea. I did not know it was possible to this simply. Thanks.
But after apt-get source chatty it outputs You must put some 'deb-src' URIs in your sources.list
What should i do to import source from Librem5 / debs / pkg-chatty · GitLab ?
Yes, I forgot to mention this, you need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file, add a “deb-src” line there for each of the regular “deb” lines there, so that it looks like this:
purism@pureos:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium main
deb-src https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-updates main
deb-src https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-updates main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-security main
deb-src https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-security main
Then do “apt update” after that to have the changes take effect, then after that the apt-get source chatty command should work.
