Same SMS received hundreds's of times - No help from O2

Dubh Geannain

A friend of mine text her work colleague today at 11:30am. Since then that person has received the same text message from her hundreds of times.

She sent the message using a HTC phone (don't recall the model at the moment).
He's using a 5 years old nokia and the texts keep coming until his inbox fills up.

They are both with O2 and have both rang them. Apparently there is nothing O2 can do. One of the staff was actually laughing down the phone as she couldn't believe the sheer number of messages that have been sent. My friend was told that this problem looks to have happened to people before texting using HTC phones. I haven't found any evidence of this online.

The recipient, is understandably at his wits end. The cell network must believe that the message hasn't been delivered and so keeps trying to send the message. I've tried to reassure him that I think text messages have a timeout feature and that the network will give up trying to send it in a day or so. This was my previous understanding. Am I correct? And if so what's the timeout typically?

Otherwise, any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

coylemj

I assume the lady with the HTC phone (who sent the text msg) has switched it off for a while to see if it's the handset that's the problem?

Dubh Geannain

coylemj wrote: »

I assume the lady with the HTC phone (who sent the text msg) has switched it off for a while to see if it's the handset that's the problem?

Yep. I even did a factory reset for her.

Max Power 2010

Dubh Geannain wrote: »

A friend of mine text her work colleague today at 11:30am. Since then that person has received the same text message from her hundreds of times.

She sent the message using a HTC phone (don't recall the model at the moment).
He's using a 5 years old nokia and the texts keep coming until his inbox fills up.

They are both with O2 and have both rang them. Apparently there is nothing O2 can do. One of the staff was actually laughing down the phone as she couldn't believe the sheer number of messages that have been sent. My friend was told that this problem looks to have happened to people before texting using HTC phones. I haven't found any evidence of this online.

The recipient, is understandably at his wits end. The cell network must believe that the message hasn't been delivered and so keeps trying to send the message. I've tried to reassure him that I think text messages have a timeout feature and that the network will give up trying to send it in a day or so. This was my previous understanding. Am I correct? And if so what's the timeout typically?

Otherwise, any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Of course O2 can do something, if both customer's are O2, then its there message centre (SMSC) trying to deliver the message.

Your spot on, the Sim has to confirm delivery before the message stops being sent/retried. Try power cycle the recipient phone (pull battery and reboot) and see if it stops, if not, well O2 need to delete this message from their SMSC.

flanders2006

I had a similar issue to this years ago on O2 on a nokia too. I think they gave me a new SIM card and that fixed it.

Dubh Geannain

The messages stopped in the early hours of the morning. I hope that's the end of it.

The guy receiving the messages was so irate that he didn't think to put his phone on silent until I spoke to him. It was like a form of Chinese torture.

Thanks for the replies anyway.