Missing Texts

I've on a vodafone PAYG sim, phone is basically just for emergency use or the occassional [very] text to/from a mate. i don't have it switched on much, just power up every few days to check. recently, at lest 3 texts from my mate haven't turned up - his phone is saying they're sent, haven't been bounced back, but there's no sign on my side. is there any way of investigating this? is it a fairly common issue or is just one of our providers a pile of cac?

TIA

SMS messages do expire although there isn't a hard and fast rule about how long so it can depend on the validity period which can be set by both the sms client and either operator. For your investigations I would get your friend to send you an SMS while your phone is off and keep doing that increasing the time it is switched off until you see how long you have before you need to check. I imagine it will be around a week at least though.

thanks for the info, it's a place to start but at least two of them vanished within a day or two as he mailed me to ask if i'd got them.

Double check the time and date on your phone is correct as i have seen received texts going to where the oldest texts are because the date defaulted to 2000 for some reason