On Sat, 4 May 2013 17:09:16 +0000 (UTC), David Lesher wondered:
>> ... does any cellphone show you when your outgoing SMS has not yet >> been delivered?
> All those I've ever used while abroad have been willing to report
> success or failure when delivering a message to the SMS gateway. On
> failure, it would remain queued in the OutBox, urging me to Retry
> sending it. Nokia, Motorola, and LG, brand-wise, all did this.
Actually, within the GSM standard there's a spec for "delivery reports" however, many operators disable that menu option. And I should qualify that this service doesn't work as normal with all GSM services. It works with T-Mobile and many other GSM operators giving you status as delivered, pending or failed. With AT&T the delivery reports are meaningless since AT&T uses a gateway for all SMS both to GSM and any other system (such as CDMA operators) so the delivery message you get from messages sent to AT&T are always "delivered" though all it means is that the message was delivered to the gateway.