State of MMS on Librem 5

Keenly awaiting MMS official release …

Right now I am being DoSed by people sending vanilla ASCII text messages whose length exceeds 160 (?) characters. :frowning:

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As the software is now, it’s not practical to make the L5 a primary device to receive SMS 2 facor tokens.

Imagine the scenario of a L5 used as a daily driver. All it would take to be locked out of your bank account for 3+ days is someone sending you a 161 character message!

MMS should be a higher priority than getting the cameras working.

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Certainly a concern but I generally avoid that by not giving companies my mobile phone number (because if I do then they have permission to spam me forever).

Weirdly though even though I cannot receive SMSs sent by senders on the same network as I am on (seemingly), I can receive SMSs sent by senders on another network. So it’s a lottery at the moment as to whether I can receive the SMS, so 2FA might work. I’m hoping that my mobile provider has some sort of timeout, so the DoSing message disappears after a while.

There are possibly different developers working on these two things, so one doesn’t necessarily take away from the other, hopefully. Anyway, if it’s relatively simple and quick to get one working before the other, I say "go for it! :slightly_smiling_face:

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To add to that, many devs are unpaid volunteers who decided to get features working (*kop316 being an unpaid volunteer).

I just decided rather than waiting for MMS, I wanted to do something about it.

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Getting cameras working was a prerequisite for FCC certification (which requires all hardware to be operational for testing), so no - it was quite obviously a higher priority.

That said, we’re already starting to get things needed for MMS in place. There’s an updated version of libqmi heading to byzantium right now, which will allow us to backport transfer-route MT patch in ModemManager, which is needed to handle MMS on some networks (and unbreaks SMS being stuck after receiving a MMS on those). Afterwards I plan to take a look at having mmsd package uploaded to byzantium, at which point it will be “just” a matter of integration into Chatty.

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Thanks @dos I appreciate the small insights you and the other devs are giving from time to time. I find them really interesting!

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@kop316 do you have some news ?
I cloned the mmsd-tng repo and saw that you have been active this past month with nice improvements, are there some things stuck in the pipeline for the official integration in L5 or PinePhone ? (maybe I’ve missed things)

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@fralb5

TL;DR: I am waiting to hear back from Purism on how to proceed with Chatty integration, and I don’t know the status of mmsd-tng in PureOS.

To be clear, I am not a Purism/Pine64/related employee, so I do not set priorities for them.

What I can tell you is mmsd-tng is in the pipeline for the Debian repo, it is in Mobian Unstable, and it is in PostmarketOS. I do not know its status for PureOS.

I can also tell you that I have a branch for chatty that supports (backend) MMS support, but still needs UI integration. But since I am not a developer for Chatty, I am waiting to hear back on how to proceed on (since I do not want to make changes then have to revert/change them again). You can see my MR here:

And my branch here:

Additionally, that branch is dependent on this MR to be merged into Chatty:

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Niiiice thanks !

The “Mms support” issue was closed yesterday after a “Enable MMS support by default” change was merged: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/issues/30

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Indeed,
Release 0.5.0 is currently being tested(which includes mms support). @kop316 and @mohammed.sadiq have put a lot of work into it, and should be thanked for their effort.

I’m testing it and have been reporting issues I see. Feel free to join in :). (NOTE: Do not send yourself an image yet, as there’s a bug with that).

WARNING: There may be bugs that make it unusable to you… Test at your own risk.

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This is great news! I can barely wait for this to hit Mobian.

One bright spot in this government-induced “supply chain crisis”… by the time I finally get my Librem 5, the software will ROCK! :metal:

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Now, chatty version 0.5.0.beta3 which is the released version in PureOS now, I have MMS working (after entering settings in ~/.mms/modemmanager/mms) but with the annoyance that when someone sends me an MMS that results in chatty creating a “group chat” with myself and the other person. The group chat comes up as a separate conversation in chatty, separate from my SMS conversation with the other person, which becomes confusing.

I think this happens because chatty is unaware of my own number, because none of the SIM cards I have tried (Tele2/Comviq and Telia in Sweden) seem to report the own number. Apparently some SIM cards behave like that. The phone/modem can ask the SIM card about its own number, but some (many) SIM cards just don’t implement that feature, I think.

Does anyone know any workaround for this?

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It might be some default configuration, group chats are MMS chats.

Hello Librem 5 friends. Some of you may recognize me from: “Got VoLte to work by enabling it… by following instructions written by smarter people.” I hope you’re ready for the sequel: Got MMS to work.

Again, for reference, I don’t consider myself a Linux expert by any means, just a user… who happens to like to tinker.

Setting - Phone set to 4G only. Using PureTalk (on AT&T backbone) with their SIM card. Standard texting (SMS) worked fine from the get go, and I fjust recently got VoLte working on the 4Gs. The next battle was MMS, since I couldn’t get group texts or **** pics.

In the Chatty preferences, Protocol settings, SMS and MMS settings I filled out the following:
MMSC: http://mmsc.mobile.att.net
APN: RESELLER [according to them, this must be in all caps]
Proxy: proxy.mobile.att.net

As soon as I exited back out of the settings, all the group messages and **** pics that I missed over the last several days showed up at once.

It was a small victory, but I wanted to share that it CAN work, and provide what got it working for me in order to provide hints toward what may help you.

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Is that a different APN compared to the APN you have for the regular mobile data connection?

Is mobile data working for you now, after you got MMS to work? One way to check this is to turn off WiFi and see if the web browser still works.

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As I understand it, sometimes you can have a main APN and also a separate one for MMS, if the all-in-one APN isn’t getting MMS. Here’s what Ting (a T-mobile reseller) says on that: https://help.ting.com/hc/en-us/articles/205428698-APN-setup-guide

Relevant quote (pertaining to Android): “Keep Ting Data selected as your APN. Your phone will use the MMS APN settings automatically as it needs.”

Yes, that should be possible, but I think currently it will not work on the Librem 5 due to this issue:

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