Zombie MMS messages

Hardware Librem 5
1

I tried setting up my Librem 5 to send MMS on the iD Mobile MVNO in the UK. I went with the “iPhone” style configuration where the port number is appended to the proxy with a colon, since there isn’t a separate field for that on the Librem 5. Conveniently, iD uses the same APN for both mobile data and MMS, so I didn’t need to worry about changing the APN like people did for Telia Sweden.

It didn’t work. I can neither send nor receive MMS. And the proxy field keeps clearing itself.

Which is not so bad; I didn’t have working MMS on the Librem 5 before, so I haven’t lost anything, although it would be nice to at least be able to receive them, because sometimes I do get sent them.

But what’s really, really annoying is that the two MMSes that failed to get sent keep duplicating themselves to the bottom of the chat, so that they appear as the most recent messages, though with their original timestamps. I’ve taken to calling these zombie MMS messages. It makes it look like I keep trying to resend them in the middle of irrelevant bits of conversation. Together, each pair of duplicate messages fills the entire screen, so I keep having to scroll up past them to see the actual chat. It also seems to mess with notifications; if I get a new message but then the zombies put in a fresh appearance, then the notification gets completely cleared (no blue LED, nothing). It also pushes that chat down the list of chats, because the “most recent” message is not from today.

Having just messed about and force-quit Chatty, I’m now seeing only one duplicate at the bottom of the chat, but usually there are at least half a dozen duplicates that appear throughout the day.

I don’t seem to be getting billed for any MMSes, although I hope it doesn’t suddenly start working and then send all the duplicates, because that could get costly fast!

At some point I suppose I will have to put in the time to figure out what’s going on here, but for now I’m just going to throw it on the forum and see if anyone has anything to say about it, because I haven’t had the time.

1 Like
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In my experience this happens because you are requesting delivery reports for MMS from Chatty and that is causing the issue. Go to preferences, SMS/MMS Settings and then turning off Delivery Reports. After that do killall chatty in your terminal a few times until it says Chatty isn’t running then launch again. That should get rid of your duplicate messages. Also, the person who did most of the work for MMS in Chatty is very active in the Mobian Matrix chat, #mobian:matrix.org, so feel free to jump in there and ask questions. You’ll likely get much quicker responses.

3 Likes
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Unfortunately, disabling delivery reports did not cause the messages to stop appearing, although perhaps it might have stopped them appearing in the first place had it not been enabled.

I haven’t got around to trying Matrix yet. Without knowing much about how the network works, it is difficult to evaluate the risks and benefits of different hosting options. Choosing a server seems to be a prerequisite for joining in, and it hasn’t been a priority for me to read up on the topic.

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I would say just pick the default Matrix network. Plenty of large Linux communities have their own, KDE, GNOME, Purism etc. Here is an issue I opened on the Chatty Gitlab page when I had the same problem, it should hopefully help you fix the issue.

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(Belatedly) Thank you! I just tried thie workaround mentioned and it has solved the problem.

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Glad it worked! I know I had my fair share of troubles getting MMS to work originally so I know how frustrating it can be sometimes!

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The zombie mms message issue still exists for me. Does this occur for anybody else still with newest chatty 0.7.2 installed?

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/issues/794