"Sent as SMS" vs "delivered"

Thanks for the definition, but to be honest, despite the fact that I use iMessage and text with family, I don't use it that much else. I feel that texting is destroying the world's ability to conduct meaningful face to face or actual telephone conversations. I've indicated that in many other threads here. Idris and I were involved in one before. Texting also seems to empower individuals to create "internet personas" and act much differently than they would in person.

Either way, I hope you received the information you needed to understand how SMS and iMessage differ and how they are handled. In regards to your response to Michael, I explained about your SMS after a week, and Idris supported that as well. You weren't going to get them based on the time frame.

Yes, it was sent. But the read receipts only apply to messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service. SMS texts, sent via your cell phone carrier’s system, do not support the use of any read receipts (that has never been a feature of SMS texting).

When a text is sent as an SMS to someone that is an iMessage user and they are not with an active internet connection, they will receive the text as soon as they are back in a cellular setting. SMS is a cellular delivery, and you will not see delivered, and the balloon will not change from green to blue.

In your case, where you were without a phone for a week, the texts that went as SMS were delivered via cellular, however they only reside on the cellular server for a couple of days. Since you exceeded that, they dropped from the server and would not be delivered. iMessages will only last on the server for a few days as well.

So, your text should have delivered when she landed and took her device off Airplane Mode.

laugher70 wrote:

Ah it's so much fun to be "ghosted" :-( Technology these days and rude people.

I cannot answer that question, since I don't really know/understand what ghosted means. While you may have seen a change like you describe for a very short period of time, it will not happen over a greater period. If you are not interested in using the Send as SMS option, just turn it off. If the iMessage cannot be delivered, then you would just see a message failure, and you would have to re-send when the person is available.

I've never seen that happen, but maybe it was because the drop in data coverage (and in a tunnel or whatnot, it would be a complete loss of both cellular and wifi, so no data connection at all) was only for a very short time, so the message cache on your device still was trying to send when the cellular or wifi data connection came back and it was able to complete the process with a data connection? In the event of neither a data nor a voice connection, the iOS message app is going to be stuck trying to send by either service, and will only finish the task when either a voice or data connection becomes available again.

FYI - most carriers reportedly only keep SMS texts on their servers for a few days, like 2 or 3 only or at most up to 4 to 7. Their servers will keep trying to send it within that time frame, but if unsuccessful, they purge the message and its just gone. Apple's iMessage service supposedly will cache messages for delivery attempts for up to 30 days, but again, once that passes, they get purged from the system completely.

If you have send as SMS on, the iOS messaging app will first check if the person is an iMessage user and if their device is reachable. If they are not reachable, it sends as SMS, and once that has completed, the message is on the cellular service providers network and has nothing to do with Apple or their iMessage service any longer.

Again, if these were SMS texts, they are gone after just a few days. No app can reach out and fetch or recover something that does not exist. Cellular service providers do not cache, archive or store unsent texts for more than a very few days. if unable to deliver them after that short period, they purge them - they are gone and there is nothing for anyone or any app to recover or collect or restore. That is the way SMS services have always been.

For correspondence you need to keep or cannot afford to miss, you really should use email, not texts. Email does explicitly have services to ensure your content is archived, and available, now and in the future. Texts do not.

laugher70 wrote:

I just turned off "send as sms" from Chris's suggestion. I'd rather see "failed to send" from Imessage than be left wondering if they got it.

As I explained in the other thread in which you were participating, SMS rarely fails. They will go through when you don't have enough signal to make a call. They don't require data. They are incredibly reliable. iMessage, on the other hand, can be a bit flaky unless it has a continuous data connection.

laugher70 wrote:

Yes, I'm soaking up everybody's input but unfortunately I seem to get differing opinions. I was out of a phone for a week and never received ANY backlogged texts sent to me during the 'blackout'. My friend, who has iPhone imessage, said she sent texts during that time period and they were green. I confirmed I never got them. So if sms is "fail safe" then the person is immature and rude by not replying back. I was hoping that wasn't the case and that it sent but never delivered. Oh well. Life goes on!

Ok. Correction to my above post. If the person has an active phone, they rarely fail. If your phone is off, as other people have noted, the system will only hold them for a couple of days (varies by carrier).

People have lots of reasons for not replying to communications. Maybe her phone is broken/stolen/left on an airplane. Maybe something is going on in her life that needs all of her attention. It happens.

laugher70 wrote:

Yes, I'm soaking up everybody's input but unfortunately I seem to get differing opinions. I was out of a phone for a week and never received ANY backlogged texts sent to me during the 'blackout'. My friend, who has iPhone imessage, said she sent texts during that time period and they were green. I confirmed I never got them. So if sms is "fail safe" then the person is immature and rude by not replying back. I was hoping that wasn't the case and that it sent but never delivered. Oh well. Life goes on!

The sending of an SMS requires a cellular voice connection, so if you can make or receive voice calls, you can send an SMS text. However, once your friend sent the SMS texts, if they could not be successfully delivered to you within just a very days, then the carrier deleted them from their system. They were successfully sent by your friend in that their phone was connected to their carrier's voice network and was able to offload the message to the carrier's servers for delivery. Once the carrier's servers was unable to successfully deliver those queued messages in after a few days of attempts, it purged them.

Texts are not like emails, where a server can deliver to another persons email service and the message sits forever on the recipient server's inbox waiting for user to read it. When the SMS messaging system cannot reach a recipient's handset to deliver the text, it only tries to do so for a short period, and then purges the message.