What is the current state of MMS on the L5? Is it working? Almost working? Work in progress? Pipe dream?
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I am also interested in this. There is this issue:
which is actually the most āpopularā issue of all, with 14 āthumbs upā on it:
A comment points to a merge request by Chris T where something happened just 14 hours ago:
Not sure what that means and if it is usable yet, but someone is doing something. 
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Chris has been posting updates to the Pine64 forum too:
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This is a screenshot of chatty receiving a MMS (including failed attempts)
Got it working 13 dec 2020 at 22:51:17 by the developper on it
Here a bit of summary of updates by the dev :
- Receiving single and group MMS works (still some known bugs to fix)
- Sending MMS is Work In Progress
But the link given by Jt0 is a must go if you want to see daily news from the dev
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And yet another related link: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#23-does-mms-multimedia-messaging-service-work.
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Sweet! Thanks for the replies. Hopefully it will be working by the time I get my phone.
Without a working camera, as yet, I donāt see myself sending a lot of MMS.
In that situation, receiving MMS is more important since you donāt control whether someone sends you an MMS. Hence sending MMS mostly arises if you want to forward an MMS.
Iām happy not to get daily news - as long as someone is working on it.
I think any text sent to multiple recipients is MMS, and that adding a subject also makes it MMS.
edit: and a text that exceeds the SMS length limit (150 chars?) also goes MMS.
On the last point, it depends on how your messaging app is set up. I believe the norm now is to send it as an MMS, but up until a few years ago it would split your message into multiple SMS messages. The issue with doing that is thereās a strong probability that the messages will arrive out of order.
And unfortunately, I have friends who output in full verbose mode at all times. 
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Last news from the developer (Jan 27 2021):
So good news, I think mmsd is in really good shape, and unless someone finds something to be a show stopper, it is at a point release!
I still am looking for help packaging it, and I still need to track down an underlying issue with Telus. But telus so far works, I just want a better solution for the bug thatās been found.
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Latest news from the developer:
I think I have the Telus issue resolved
I have been working to better integrate MMS support into a future release of chatty
I finally got mmsd packaged up for Debian!
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Lastest news from the dev:
Support into chatty is very close to being finished
Something interesting I have learned about the MMS specification. Contrary to how it is used today, you can send almost any file over MMS. It handles PDFs, Word Docs, even arbietrary binary files (I have sent and recieved these all of these over MMS!)
I havenāt worked a functional front end, but I donāt see a reason for Chatty to not support it
I am not sending SMIL with my MMS, but I have not figured out SMIL for chatty
So, my guess on this would be that the first version for chatty will support simple MMS with texts, images and video compatible with Android and co
Sending/receiving any file with gnu/linux smartphones will become available soon after (encryption, here we come 
)
He mentionned also that for the moment he doesnāt support SMIL (which is some kind of equivalent of HTML but for MMS instead of web page)
So, my guess here would be that instead of having, for example, a MMS image with a rotated red text in the middle of it, you will have the image followed by a text in the chatty colors, or the other way around (text followed by image)
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More good news from the dev:
" So Iām pretty excited about this! I finally have a fully working reference implementation of MMS with chatty! All that is left to do is to help incorporate it into chatty with the developer."
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Receiving MMS can be made to work now if you install some not-yet-official fixes:
Not sure about sending, maybe it is possible to send an MMS but I donāt know how.
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Realistically you want a working camera before you worry about sending an MMS - well, for my usage thatās true. Wouldnāt have to be true for everyone.
I think MMS handles more than just photos, though. Very long text messages and group messages, for example. As well as photos or small audio files (for example) that you have stored on the phone from any origin.
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Yes. For my usage ā¦ no. I rather dislike group messages and I only ever send and receive photos. So, absent a camera, it is only useful to me to receive photos from other people - which is still useful to me.
Maybe it could be useful for some kind of voicemail, or maybe it is even needed for the standard carrier voicemail implementations (when they are not in the network). However thatās not something that I use much on my mainstream phone.
I wonder if iOS uses SMIL is some way to send the āspecialā imessage animations. I also wonder if we can send the right code we can trigger the imessage animation from Chatty and itās not some icloud service?
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SMIL seems very basic, I donāt know much about imessage but it probably use its own messaging system with a SMS/MMS compatibility