One contact receiving randomly old texts from me instead of new one?!!

[Anonymous]

Hello,

So, I have a weird problem.

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, on O2 and I have one contact in my phone book who, when I send him an SMS/text, replies to say that he has received a message from me, but it's an old message that was originally sent and received weeks or months ago, instead of the message I actually just wrote and sent.

It doesn't always happen but seems to be pot luck whether he gets the message I intended, or some random historic message from me instead.

On my end, this only happens with him, and for him, this only happens with me.

I have tried deleting his contact and re-entering it etc, and also, I thought that requesting a delivery report by putting *0# before each message might have helped for a while, but the problem still persists.

I have no problem receiving correct texts from him, by the way.

I just rang O2, where a disinterested operative just said it must be my friend's fault, and that was that, but I asked that it be looked in to.

Given that I fully expect O2 to say there's nothing wrong their end and it must be my friend's fault, does anyone know what might be going on here?

My friend is on Virgin and has a very basic Nokia phone (not a Smartphone - he's a bit of a Luddite...), if that's any help.

Thanks

M

[MI5]

Try replacing your sim first.
It’s free to do in any o2 shop.

[Martin-O2]

Hi @Anonymous have you had any luck with getting this issue sorted yet? 

[Anonymous]

Hi there, thanks for the responses!

Well, I rang O2 again to see if I could speak to someone else more helpful than the disinterested bloke the first time, and I did speak to a chap who suggested I get my SIM swapped.

So, I deleted all saved messages for that one contact that I was having the problem with, and went to the O2 shop to get a new SIM and things seem to be OK now, but for how long, I don't know.

Will keep an eye on it!

M

[Martin-O2]

That sounds promising @Anonymous! Please keep us posted on any developments. 

[MI5]

That's the usual fix

[Anonymous]

Argh!  It's happening again!

Except this time, he's not getting an old message of mine, but instead it's stopping at "messa* some text missing*" and not loading the rest of the message.

I'm thinking that because he has a very basic Nokia (non-smartphone) phone, it's having problems with long messages that exceed the 160 character count, or whatever it was back in the day...?

Today, he's been getting all my short messages ok, and even when I resent the long one, he got that, so it's all very erratic, as it wasn't working yesterday.

He's suggested going back to using Royal Mail.  Apparently there are some very nice writing sets in the sales...

[MI5 · Accepted solution]

Yes, the old Nokia phones won't receive any more than one text at a time and because the network thinks the entire text has been delivered, the 2nd or 3rd parts don't always arrive.
Sometimes they do though, but much later on.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, yes, I'll stick to sending him short texts and see if that continues to be ok....

Technology eh....

[MI5]

Progress