Overview

A party sent an MMS message to B party, and the message delivery time exceeded the validity time stated by MMSC in the attached request to B party. Due to this request, this message failed to deliver to B party - B party dropped the message!

You would like to know the expiry time values set for sent MMS messages and whether the value can be modified to avoid the situations like above.

 

Solution

Such situations can happen when the message Expiry Time is set too low (e.g. 600 seconds) but the actual delivery takes more time. In such cases, a message will be dropped by receiving party.

Diagnosis

To verify this, check the logs to see the messages and their corresponding expiry dates. The logs can be found under /var/log/mercury/mdg/messages/88/FB/MM_MM7_INPUT.<###>

For example, in the message below the expiry time (ExpiryDate property) is 800 seconds:

The usual ExpiryDate values are much hight, like:

ExpiryDate: PT21600S
ExpiryDate: PT34080S
ExpiryDate: PT43200S

As you can see in the list above, normally messages are set to expire after at least 6 hours (21600 = 6 hours), so 800 seconds (or a similar lower value) looks like a misconfiguration.

 

Solution Steps

To avoid such situations in the future, A Party should reconfigure their sending application and increase the ExpiryDate value to several hours.

You can refer to the Expire Time Field Characteristics article for updating this value.