SMS list different between mmcli and AT commands

[Dylan Van Assche]

Hi Matthew,

On Wed, 2022-07-20 at 16:06 -0400, Matthew Via wrote:
> On my pinephone pro I occasionally miss an SMS.  I'm not sure which
> circumstances lead to the missing messages, but if I use AT commands
> to query the modem, I have an (over time, growing) list of messages
> that don't get deleted.  Some of these are badly handled multipart
> messages, but some are just simple text messages that are still
> marked UNREAD, and never made their way into chatty somehow.  In all
> of these cases though, the mmcli output is empty:
> 
> # mmcli -m 0 --messaging-list-sms
> No sms messages were found
> 
> However:
> echo 'AT+CMGF=1' | sudo ./atinout - /dev/ttyUSB2 -
> 
> OK
> echo 'AT+CMGL="ALL"' | sudo ./atinout - /dev/ttyUSB2 -
> 
> +CMGL: 0,"REC READ","xxxxxxxxxx","22/04/02,09:48:09+00",,129,3
> ...
> +CMGL: 1,"REC READ","XXXXXXXX","22/06/22,22:18:38+00",,129,6
> ...
> +CMGL: 2,"REC READ","XXXXXX","22/06/22,23:25:26+00",,129,7
> ...!
> +CMGL: 3,"REC READ","XXXXX","22/06/22,23:31:23+00",,129,5
> ...
> +CMGL: 4,"REC READ","XXXXX","22/06/23,12:01:16+00",,129,4
> ...
> +CMGL: 5,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/23,18:50:55+00",,129,84
> ...
> +CMGL: 6,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/23,19:07:24+00",,129,48
> ...
> +CMGL: 7,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/23,22:00:20+00",,129,132
> ...
> +CMGL: 8,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/23,22:00:20+00",,129,132
> ...
> +CMGL: 10,"REC READ","XXXXX","22/06/24,13:30:49+00",,129,3
> ...
> +CMGL: 11,"REC READ","XXXXX","22/06/24,13:30:58+00",,129,23
> ...
> +CMGL: 12,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/24,16:35:40+00",,129,34
> ...
> +CMGL: 13,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/24,16:35:56+00",,129,22
> ...
> +CMGL: 14,"REC READ","XXXX","22/06/24,16:36:06+00",,129,16
> ...
> [ more truncated ]
> +CMGL: 48,"REC UNREAD","XXXX","22/07/11,22:20:25+00",,129,30
> ...
> +CMGL: 50,"REC UNREAD","XXXX","22/07/16,22:03:11+00",,129,56
> ....
> +CMGL: 51,"REC UNREAD","XXXX","22/07/17,18:10:56+00",,129,134
> ...
> +CMGL: 53,"REC UNREAD","XXXX","22/07/19,18:03:05+00",,129,48
> ...
> +CMGL: 54,"REC UNREAD","XXXX","22/07/19,20:36:16+00",,129,1
> ...
> +CMGL: 55,"REC UNREAD","XXXXX","22/07/19,20:36:23+00",,129,12
> ...
> +CMGL: 56,"REC UNREAD","XXXXX","22/07/19,20:36:28+00",,129,16
> ...
> +CMGL: 57,"REC UNREAD","XXXXX","22/07/19,20:36:34+00",,129,17
> ...
> +CMGL: 58,"REC UNREAD","XXXXX","22/07/19,20:49:02+00",,129,22
> ...
> +CMGL: 59,"REC UNREAD","XXXXX","22/07/19,20:49:14+00",,129,27
> ...
> 
> 
> The "REC READ" messages accumulating is an issue since when it fills
> up (100), all inbound SMS's get dropped, so I need to regularly
> (every week or so) use AT commands to purge them.  The "REC UNREAD"
> ones I just never receive unless I regularly query the modem as
> above.  However, unless I am misunderstanding the mmcli command, the
> main issue here seems to be that modemmanager is unaware of the
> messages in the first place.  What next steps are there to debugging
> these issues?
> 
> This is a Pinephone Pro running Mobian using the open source modem
> firmware (0.6.7), though I had the exact same issue on my non-Pro
> pinephone running PostmarketOS.  Currently this is MM 1.18.10, though
> I've seen the issue since I started using the phones, and that was on
> 1.18.2.
> 
> Thank you, Matthew

We have seen this behavior in the past due to suspend/resume.
The EG25-G modem in these devices does not send QMI messages in some
cases when resuming. However, it does send AT URCs for it in a reliable
way. ModemManager was modified back then to use both sources as a
trigger to retrieve your SMS from the modem. To locate this issue, we
should have usbmon logs and ModemManager logs when this problem
happens. If you supply such logs, please scrub them from any personal
information such as phone numbers, text content, IMEI, equipment IDs,
etc.

To get the logs in postmarketOS, we have a troubleshooting guide [1].
You could probably apply similiar things to Mobian.

Kind regards,
Dylan

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Modem#Troubleshooting