Charles E. Muntz
Level 1 (4 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Messages no longer properly forwards SMS

Hello,

Since upgrading to Sierra and iOS 10, Messages on my Mac no longer properly forwards SMS texts. I can still type them and send them, and they appear to have been sent correctly on both the Mac and my iPhone, but the recipients report getting nothing but weird boxes instead of the actual message. I tried disabling and then re-enabling text message forwarding on the phone, but that did not fix the problem. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Charles

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), macOS Sierra (10.12), Used with an iPhone 6S with 10.0.2

Posted on Oct 14, 2016 3:09 PM

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Charles E. Muntz

Q: Messages no longer properly forwards SMS

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  • by William Kucharski,

    William Kucharski William Kucharski Oct 14, 2016 3:29 PM in response to Charles E. Muntz
    Level 6 (15,232 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 14, 2016 3:29 PM in response to Charles E. Muntz

    There have been a few reports of this, but most have turned out to be issues with carriers or recipients' devices (e.g. when they rebooted their phones, everything worked properly.)

     

    Are you sending to other iPhones or to other devices?

  • by Charles E. Muntz,

    Charles E. Muntz Charles E. Muntz Oct 14, 2016 5:03 PM in response to William Kucharski
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 14, 2016 5:03 PM in response to William Kucharski

    I'm sending to other devices - one is an Android, one is an old Blackberry. I find it odd that two different devices should have the same problem receiving the texts I send through my computer immediately after I upgraded my OSs, unless it is some bug on either my laptop or my iPhone.

     

    One observation - I haven't confirmed this for certain, but it seems that messages that use only the basic ASCII character set go through correctly, but if there is a special character, even something as simple as a curly apostrophe, then they are garbled. Not certain that this is always the case, but I think it might be.

     

    Thanks!

  • by William Kucharski,

    William Kucharski William Kucharski Oct 15, 2016 4:03 AM in response to Charles E. Muntz
    Level 6 (15,232 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 15, 2016 4:03 AM in response to Charles E. Muntz

    This may be true; in fact use of special characters to send an SMS to a Sprint user used to guarantee the message was simply discarded.

     

    Why?

     

    Because by default the SMS character set only knows about good old ASCII and/or GSM 0.38, and Unicode characters are not ASCII/GSM 0.38.

     

    Wikipedia shows the GSM 7-bit character set here; to save you a bit of clicking, for English it's:

     

    Screen Shot 2016-10-15 at 5.00.32 AM.png

     

    I believe when a carrier receives an SMS message with characters it doesn't support, the result is, as old-school programmers would say, "implementation dependent." ;-)