Sent message is sometimes merged with a much older message.
I have been having a weird bug for several years that has probably happened about 8 times overall, but twice in the past week. Basically, two messages, the one that is currently being sent, and another that is months, possibly years old, are merged together, but only for the recipient, not for the sender. Fortunately, both messages are (as far as I have seen) ones that have been sent to the same recipient. It is probably best illustrated in an example (these aren’t real messages).
Text 1: Sent Today; Recipient: Jane
We’re all doing fine thanks, just busy. Peter is in the garden relaxing and getting some sun and hopefully doing the garden.
Text 2: Sent in Early 2022; Recipient: Jane
The old man across the road is very poorly; an ambulance was called for him and he was taken to hospital. He has had to have an operation; unfortunately he really isn’t doing very well at all and probably isn’t going to make it.
Text 1 is what is sent, but what arrives is this below:
Text 3: Sent Today; Recipient: Jane
We’re all doing fine thanks, just busy. Peter has had to have an operation; unfortunately he really isn’t doing very well at all and probably isn’t going to make it.
Obviously, this can cause a little upset and consternation when received, to say the least! Fortunately, it has only happened when sending to my girlfriend, and friends, (at least as far as I know!) and I have been able to trace the message and understand what has happened. But I wonder how often this happens and we just don’t know? To the recipient, nothing seems wrong with the message apart from occasionally messed up punctuation, so may go unmentioned. As far as the sender is concerned, his original message was sent. If it weren’t for people sending me back my message asking what I was talking about, I would not have noticed this at all.
This only happens on messages that I send. In the history.sqlite the sent messages looks normal (i.e. Text 1 above) but the recipient has somehow received Text 3.
Things I have noticed:
- It is always the first half of the message that arrives fine, and the second half that is replaced.
- This only ever happens on long messages, at least 2 standard text messages in size, sometimes more.
- It is always a much, much older message that replaces the second half of the intended message. Sometimes months, sometimes years older.
- This happened to me on the 13th June 2023 when message 9197 sent at 12:20pm was mixed with message 4398 that was originally sent on the 25th August 2022 at 12:35pm.
- It happened again on the 19th June 2023 when message 9395 sent at 12:45pm was mixed with message 4895 that was originally sent on the 4th October 2022 at 12:07pm.
- This has happened on at least two different phones, most recently a Pixel 3a but also on a Pinephone and possibly an Aquaris E4.5.
This is a slight annoyance, that I initially put down to just some bizarre glitch that would probably never happen again; and then of course, I completely forget about it until it happens again. But what concerns me, is what if this is happening a lot more than we realize? Worse still, what if rather than just sending the intended recipient a message that was sent to them months ago, it is sometimes sending messages that were originally sent to a completely different recipient? That could cause problems.