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Destination does not support enhanced messaging service - MSG NOT more than 160 chars

I received this message yesterday after sending an SMS to a Samsung Facinate phone from my LG enV3:

Message Delivered to [phone number] as plain text Destination does not support enhanced messaging service

I have searched all over about this issue and everything I have found is in reference to messages which are too long (more than 160 charachters) or messages which contain some media (pictures, video, etc).

I sent a message which was 59 characters long with no image or other media attached. We are both on Verizon (even on the same family plan). We have sent many messages to each other before with no issues. The message received was a jumble of characters, just un-readable garbage. The only thing I can think of is that somehow the message was being formatted in some odd way because of my use of asterix *** in the message. I put a star on either side of a word like: *sigh*

In some systems this is used to translate the word to bold formatting. I'm wondering if that could be happening with my text message too.

Has anyone else seen this? Does putting * charachters around a word cause it to get formatted differently and therefore change the message to an enhanced message?

If so, is there a way to turn that off?

Comments

SuzyQ

In addition to texts greater than 160 characters, or media containing messages, some formatting does NOT translate to all phones.

Colored text, text in a different font, smilies, these can all be seen as "enhanced" and mess things up if the receiving phone can't "translate".

A signature can also cause the effect you are describing.

I don't know if the asterisks would cause that behavior....if that was all you did differently, it may have. I don't know how to turn it off :smileysad:

george27

The formatting is what I suspect is the problem, but I do not know how to add formatting to my messages. I did not intend to add any formatting. The only thing different in this message was the use of * around a word.

Does anyone else out there know if adding * around a word will cause formatting to be applied to your text message?

And if so, how can I turn that off. I want all my SMS messages to be sent as plain text.

Leslie1

Any characters other than letters and numbers are considered a special character. It will send SMS message but will not have the * character in text.

george27

@Leslie1

Thanks for helping out on this issue.

I just tried to send a short message to the same number again and received the error again. This message had nothing but letters and a period. There is no way that a period or comma are special charachters! Once again, all that was received was a bunch of garbled, unreadable text.

So, I called VZW support. Of course, when I'm on the phone, he asks me to send a test message and it worked. The message I sent was. "This is a test * "

Notice that the test message DOES have the * in it and it went through just fine. It was not stripped out. Next, my wife sent me a message: "can you see these? & @ # % * "

I was able to see the message without any trouble. She also sent: "another *test* "

Again I had no problem receiving the message. So, why does it fail when I try to send a message like *test* ??

The support guy did not know what character combinations would cause the message to get converted to an enhanced message. He also could not tell me where the message is converted. Is this something done by my phone? the system? the receivers phone?

AND he could not tell me how to turn this feature off. If anyone else can help answer these questions, I would appreciate it.

acraftylady2

Try sending as a picture message and see what happens, don't have to attach a picture to do that. Mary

george27

This problem is still happening. I just sent about an 80 charachter text and it was rejected and scrambled. There was a % sign in the message, so I guess the network can't handle it. It's completely rediculous!

@acraftylady - thanks for the input, but I don't want to send a picute message. i simply want to send a text message with standard characters in it. There is no reason it should be rejected. And definitely no reason that it should work sometimes and not others.

Please, does anyone know if VZW is trying to apply formatting to a message based on characters I type in? And can that be turned off?

Is there a list of safe characters for text messages??

treecutter

The same thing happened to me today. The phone I sent the message to was also a Samsung Fascinate. Maybe that's the problem

treecutter

Check out this for your answer.

http://androidforums.com/fascinate-support-troubleshooting/187940-destination-does-not-support-enhanced-messaging.html

acraftylady2

If you read there someone states the short term work around to send more than 160 characters is to use MMS. I know ran into this once when I had my ENV2 and sending as a picture message solved it so I could send more than 160 characters. Mary

george27

I appreciate everyone's thoughts on this problem, but I am confused why the discussion keeps drifting toward messages with more than 160 characters. Even for the discussion in the link you provided, that is the main point of conversation. I am not trying to send more than 160 characters. That is why I put "MSG NOT more than 160 chars" in the subject for this thread. I am talking about simple SMS messages getting converted to EMS because of some characters in the message.

Clearly, if I try to send a smiley face like this :smileyhappy: in a text it will have to be an EMS for the receiver to see the graphic image of a smiley. But what about just putting a colon followed by a right-parenthesis? : )

I don't want my phone or the network to translate that to a graphic smiley. I just want it to send a colon and paren.

Just like I don't want it to translate something like *this* to bold text. I want it to send the exact characters that I type!! Is that too much to ask?? I can not accept that these characters are considered special, non-sendable as regular text messages. I'm not talking about sending non-ASCII characters or umlauts or something like that. I can send a message with *s in it, but if I wrap them around a word like *this*, then it tries to convert the message.

To provide some detail, I received the error messages when sending a text from an LG Env3 to a Samsung Fascinate. I did read in the link above to the other forum how one user was speculating there was an issue when sending between a smart phone and a "dumb" phone (or multimedia phone). This could be a big part of the problem, but again that was in the context of long messages and not these formatting issues I'm dealing with.

I just want the answers to a couple simple questions:

1) What characters are considered special and can not be sent by normal text messages? I tend to think that if the characters is on the flip-out keyboard, it should be sendable. Does anyone know of a list somewhere that will tell me what characters are allowed?

2) How do I tell my phone or the VZW messaging system to stop trying to translate my SMS to an EMS based on characters in my message?

Stop turning : ) into :smileyhappy: or *this* into this.

If I sound frustrated, it's because I am frustrated with this problem. I am not irritated with any of the posters who have been trying to help with their experiences and thoughts. I appreciate all your ideas on the matter.

SuzyQ

george27 wrote:

I just want the answers to a couple simple questions:

1) What characters are considered special and can not be sent by normal text messages? None that I know of, that are on a standard keyboard phone. I havbe the Voyager, I send : ) in messages (without the space) often, and have never had anyone complain of errors. I tend to think that if the characters is on the flip-out keyboard, it should be sendable. Does anyone know of a list somewhere that will tell me what characters are allowed?

2) How do I tell my phone or the VZW messaging system to stop trying to translate my SMS to an EMS based on characters in my message?
Stop turning : ) into or *this* into this. This is the only time I have heard of this happening...I just sent a test text to my daughter (I have a Voyager, she has an EnV3) that said This is a *test* and it went through exactly as I typed it - it did not convert the word to bold. I tend to think there is something else going on that is making these texts be rejected. The most likely culprit is a signature. Check your messaging settings and be sure it is set to NONE, and that the Custom signature field is BLANK.

If I sound frustrated, it's because I am frustrated with this problem. I am not irritated with any of the posters who have been trying to help with their experiences and thoughts. I appreciate all your ideas on the matter.

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