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I sent a short message to someone, and I thought I was sending an SMS, but when I asked them if they have read my SMS, they corrected me, and said "yes, I read your MMS". How did they know it's an MMS? What's the difference in this case? I know MMS allows for longer text, and images/videos, but my message was short and contained no media, so how did they know it was MMS and not SMS? What gave it away?

Note that the CRS was enabled. Is this what gave it away?

We both use Samsung phones, although mine is newer.

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  • SMS are directly sent to the target device. For MMS the target device only gets a data SMS containing the information that there is an MMS available. The device then can connect to the MMS server using data connection and download the MMS. If I remember correctly this should more or less the way it works.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 17 at 12:56
  • I'm not sure that's true, because when I receive a long message, which means an MMS, I just get the message itself, not a message telling me where to download it.
    – Taisho Mori
    Commented Feb 17 at 14:01
  • The is done automatically by your phone. As I said the first SMS containing the MMS notification is a data SMS, such SMS are never displayed to the user.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 17 at 14:35
  • See also the technical description how an MMS is received: 2nd paragraph of the "Technical description": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… The "SMS control message" is the data SMS I was talking about.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 17 at 14:45
  • 1
    That your SMS app does not display the message type does not mean it is not shown by other SMS apps.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 17 at 15:04

1 Answer 1

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Depending on the apps, some messaging apps have a feature to display whether a message is an SMS, MMS, or RCS; whether it's on a different menu or directly beside the message. RCS feature is unrelated to knowing the message type.

Google Messages

  1. Long tap the message
  2. Select the overflow menu (3 vertical dots) on the top-right
  3. Tap View details
  4. Message Details will show the type: SMS, MMS, RCS

Samsung Messages

  1. Long tap the message
  2. Select View details
  3. Message details will show the type: Text message (SMS), Multimedia message (MMS)

Truecaller

  1. Long tap the message
  2. Tap More on the bottom-right
  3. Tap Message details
  4. The type will be shown under the text: SMS, MMS

Also, RCS messages may be shown as MMS instead on another messaging app.

Google Messages (sent with RCS) Samsung Messages (RCS disabled) Truecaller (no RCS support)
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