Unable to receive MMS, firewall ports?

Unable to receive MMS, firewall ports? SearchSearch
Author Message
Mark Guinn
New member
Username: Markguinn

Post Number: 1
Registered: 06-2011
Posted on Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 11:49 am:   

We're running a trial version of NowSMS Lite on a Windows XP box at our office. It's connected to a ZTE 3G USB Tri-band(HSPDA/UTMS) & Quad-band(EDGE/GPRS) Unlocked Modem with an AT&T SIM card (in the US). We can send and receive both SMS and MMS and also receive SMS messages, but incoming MMS messages aren't even registering in the logs or the sent/received counts in NowSMS Lite.

I don't really know where to start, but one thought I had was whether there need to be open ports on our router's firewall for the MMS to get through.

Thanks,
Mark
Mark Guinn
New member
Username: Markguinn

Post Number: 2
Registered: 06-2011
Posted on Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 11:51 am:   

I should add that the "Receive MMS Messages" setting is indeed checked. :) Under the 2-Way tab I currently have "Process MMS Messages" checked as well with the option to save them in the MMS-IN folder. Thanks.
Des - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Desosms

Post Number: 3302
Registered: 08-2008
Posted on Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 06:00 pm:   

Hi Mark,

There should be no reason to open any firewall ports. NowSMS will initiate an HTTP (or WSP) GET over the modem to fetch the MMS message content.

What it sounds like, however, is that you are not receiving the MMS notification. This is the trigger for MMS message delivery, which occurs over SMS. Are you seeing any increase in the received SMS count when an MMS is sent to the device? If the MMS notification is being received, you should.

Unfortunately, without the MMS notification trigger, there is no way of receiving the MMS.

Was this SIM card provisioned for the modem? Frequently in this case, the operator does not enable MMS support for the device, because they assume their is no MMS client on the device that is prepared to receive and process the MMS notification messages.

I'd suggest putting the SIM card into a phone and confirming that the phone can receive MMS messages using that SIM. If it can't, then something needs to be enabled on the operator end.

If it can receive MMS messages when in the phone, then I'm not sure ... but I'd start by verifying that the SIM can receive MMS messages when installed in a phone.

--
Des
NowSMS Support
Mark Guinn
New member
Username: Markguinn

Post Number: 3
Registered: 06-2011
Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2011 - 10:07 pm:   

Thanks for your response. The modem is unlocked. The SIM card IS provisioned for a modem, but we checked with AT&T and they confirmed that there is nothing locked or turned off on our account that would prevent receiving MMS messages. We also tried the SIM in an iphone 3GS and were able to receive MMS.

I confirmed that the SMS received count does not increase when a send an MMS message to the modem #. Is it true that the trigger message should come through even if we had the wrong APN settings? I'm pretty sure the APN settings are correct as they're the default AT&T/Cingular settings from NowSMS and they're confirmed by a google search.

So where does that leave us? To my mind this points to a faulty modem, but is there anything else we can check in our NowSMS config or anything before we go out and buy a new modem?

Thanks,
Mark
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 7982
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Friday, July 01, 2011 - 01:42 pm:   

Hi Mark,

Yes, the SMS trigger (MMS notification) should be received even if the APN is incorrect.

Normally what I would suggest is sending a WAP push message from the modem to itself to confirms that the modem receives binary messages correctly. However, AT&T blocks mobile originated WAP push.

I suspect the modem has a problem with binary messages or port addressed messages.

-bn
Mark Guinn
New member
Username: Markguinn

Post Number: 4
Registered: 06-2011
Posted on Friday, July 01, 2011 - 03:45 pm:   

Bryce, Thanks for your insight. Here's another piece of the puzzle - I tried to send an MMS message from the modem to it's own phone #. The message failed to send (got stuck in the outbound queue) and the error NowSMS is showing is "502 Bad Gateway". I'm attaching the MMSCDEBUG.LOG.

Does that shed any more light on what's going on?

application/octet-streamMMSC Debug log
MMSCDEBUG.LOG (230.9 k)
Mark Guinn
New member
Username: Markguinn

Post Number: 5
Registered: 06-2011
Posted on Friday, July 01, 2011 - 03:57 pm:   

Ha. Never mind. I had just set my APN settings wrong.