Can a sim receive texts out of the phone?

[JIM600]

Hi all,

I did try to google this, but couldnt get anything helpful.

I took my simcard out of my phone last week, put a new sim in and went on holiday. Now I know that my old sim has had several messages sent to it during that time, but when I put the old sim back in the phone - I get no notification of new texts, so what has happened to the 20 or so texts sent to my old sim while it was sitting on the desk, are they in cyberspace? Is there anyway to access them, or will they come through to the phone at some point in the next 24hrs, or gone forever?

Hopefully that makes sense, I'm (obviously) not really a phone/tech whizz.
Cheers

[mrmr96]

They will come through later, just as if the phone had been off.

[JIM600]

I see, cheers for the help, good news

And will they come through as "new" texts, ie dated/timed ahead of the ones on the phone which I got on the new simcard over the last week, or will they slot in at the times they would have been sent?

[eatontrifles]

SMS messages have a time limit that they will be tried by the network before expiring. I seem to recall around 10 years ago that the default was seven days and by adding a string of text to the beginning of your message you could change it to however long you wanted.

[Mr E]

If the sim isn't in a phone under coverage, the sms will sit in the SMSC (server) awaiting delivery.

How long they wait is down to policy, and I have no idea on that.

[GlenMH]

The SMSC on Vodafone will keep trying for 7 days and after that the texts evaporate.

[tribbles]

When an SMS is sent, part of the message is a field which signifies the timeout for the message - this allows the SMSC to keep hold of the message and send it to the subscriber when the subscriber is next connected to the network. However, if the subscriber doesn't connect, then the message will be discarded if the timeout is reached.

Not all devices allow you to set the timeout, so it would probably be the device's default value (whatever that is).