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SMS mailbox full

W

welles13

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 3, 2007
75
80
I was shocked when I went to my SMS messages and a pop-up appeared informing me to delete some messages. With 8gigs of storage this is absolutely scandalous. I really thought the bad old days of having to delete texts were behind us with the advent of the iPhone.

Is there really any technical reason that these messages, totaling 1 or 2k a piece, should max out?!?
 
Is there no facility to move your SMS messages to you Mac? That would be equally shocking.
 
Irrelevant. I, like most people, enjoy re-reading old texts on my phone. It is good to reminisce on-the-fly in this fashion. There is no reason that these should ever max out.
 
There is no option to get texts off the iPhone. But as I have said, this should not be happening; there should be no storage limit on these tiny files when we have 8 gig to play with.
 
the worst part is that you can't select texts to delete. its either a whole conversation has to go or stay. grrr.
 
you guys find some very idiotic things to complain about. i go for 1 to 2 days texting multiple people before having to delete texts. and my first month i sent 11 thousand texts. how often do you go back to looking at messages from days ago? the average person never even cares
 
nanc said:
you guys find some very idiotic things to complain about. i go for 1 to 2 days texting multiple people before having to delete texts. and my first month i sent 11 thousand texts. how often do you go back to looking at messages from days ago? the average person never even cares
Click to expand...

Almost 400 texts a day, now that's impressive!
 
either your being sarcastic or you dont belive me. i know people who send alot more but im just making a point that it really isnt a big deal to have to delete a conversation every once in awhile
 
its not that i care about having to delete 'em. thats not a big deal.
but there are some here and there that i'd like to be able to save for sentimental value really. but there is no way to 'lock' one specific text so it doesn't get deleted. petty maybe. but it'd be nice. especially since i know most phones have that feature.
 
ya i do agree that it would be cool if you could save specific conversations onto your computer. thats a good thing for an update!
 
I don't have an iPhone yet, but the phone i use seems to dynamically allocate memory from a memory pool, and right now i've got 967 messages in my inbox, over 350 sent messages (after i did a delete all in May), and also messages i've moved to Personal folders, and it hasn't complained yet. Surely there are a few megabytes available from the 8GB allocation that can be dynamically allocated to the needs of the phone side?
 
I'm wondering if its possible that the iPhone is storing SMS on the SIM card? Many phones give you that option, should you so desire. I'm not saying it makes sense, but the pool of storage space on the SIM is much smaller than on the phone itself.

The only real advantage of that is that you can take the SMS with you to another phone, although that seems marginal given all the limitations on the iPhone SIM....
 
welles13 said:
There is no option to get texts off the iPhone. But as I have said, this should not be happening; there should be no storage limit on these tiny files when we have 8 gig to play with.
Click to expand...

You're right, but I am also horrified that Apple has not included any sort of way to move text messages to an inbox on the Mac. Further proof that Apple and America in general just don't get it when it comes to texts. SMS is a great medium.
 
netdog said:
You're right, but I am also horrified that Apple has not included any sort of way to move text messages to an inbox on the Mac. Further proof that Apple and America in general just don't get it when it comes to texts. SMS is a great medium.
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a generalization. :rolleyes:

If that's true, then what, Europe gets texts? Has Nokia ever written an SMS app with threaded conversations, or is it just the usual, contextless one-off messages?
 
riverfreak said:
If that's true, then what, Europe gets texts? Has Nokia ever written an SMS app with threaded conversations, or is it just the usual, contextless one-off messages?
Click to expand...

Actually, how do the Nokia and Sony Ericsson-provided software do this in Windows (or OS X? But they don't have great track records for OS X software)? Do they let you pick which inbox of Outlook to put them in, or create their own saved mailbox feature?

The last time I used Nokia PC Suite must've been before they implemented this.
 
netdog said:
You're right, but I am also horrified that Apple has not included any sort of way to move text messages to an inbox on the Mac. Further proof that Apple and America in general just don't get it when it comes to texts. SMS is a great medium.
Click to expand...

Sorry for my rather glib response earlier.

I took a quick look at how messages are stored. They're located in an SQLite database. I just wrote a little script that fetches messages from the phone and emails them. It's not particularly useful at the moment since it requires that your phone be sprung from jail. It's a start.
 
riverfreak said:
I took a quick look at how messages are stored. They're located in an SQLite database. I just wrote a little script that fetches messages from the phone and emails them. It's not particularly useful at the moment since it requires that your phone be sprung from jail. It's a start.
Click to expand...

Definitely a start. Though SQLite should not be the bottleneck for why the iPhone has such a small memory for SMS messages. According to the SQLite website, it can manage database files up to a terabyte in size.
 
nanc said:
you guys find some very idiotic things to complain about. i go for 1 to 2 days texting multiple people before having to delete texts. and my first month i sent 11 thousand texts. how often do you go back to looking at messages from days ago? the average person never even cares
Click to expand...

Its not the point, you should be able to store whatever you want... thats why I bought an 8gig phone!
 
The OP is absolutely correct. I used to have a Blackberry and never reached any sort of limits when it came to text messages / e-mails. I remember easily having over 2 months worth of conversations in my Blackberry. I couldn't even calculate how many messages but I can say well over 1,000 SMS.

This is unnacceptable in a phone of this cost/capacity. Hopefully a software update will correct this as well.

Im beginning to think Apple has a pretty long list of user requests on software issues and upgrades.
 
Question to you all, how many text messages (SMS) do you guys have stored before this message appears?
 
It has to be a software limitation. My BlackJack with a 1gb microSD card is currently holding messages dating back to November '06. I send and recieve around 1000 texts a month, and I haven't deleted any since November, which means I'm storing easily 10,000, plus music and pictures. The iPhone should be more than capable (hardware)-wise to hold a lifetime of texts.

I wonder if you delete some music or videos if the number you can store will go up.
 
nanc said:
you guys find some very idiotic things to complain about. i go for 1 to 2 days texting multiple people before having to delete texts. and my first month i sent 11 thousand texts. how often do you go back to looking at messages from days ago? the average person never even cares
Click to expand...
I don't use sms messages a whole lot. Only my boss and one of my friends really sends me sms. However, there are some things that I get in IM that I have to refer back to. IP addresses, passwords (encrypted when transmitted), addresses, and stuff like that. I use message logging, and often look back through the logs for that kind of information. I would want the same feature on the iPhone.

-jt2
 
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