In the Classic View, MessageTracker helps you track sent, pending and delivered messages

Why might I need to track messages?

If you're sending critical messages to your Contact Groups, such as information on the security situation where they're living or working, or reminders to take medicine, or wildlife alerts or details of a cancelled meeting where people may have to travel long distances, it might be useful to know which messages have been successfully delivered to the Group members, which ones have failed, and which are pending. In FrontlineSMS the MessageTracker module does this for you

Messages which you have sent which are still "Pending", i.e. they have not yet arrived on the recipients phone, are displayed in the top Pending Messages window [1]. Pending messages may be caused by the recipient's mobile phone being switched off, or the recipient may be in an area with no coverage, or their phone may be damaged or broken. If their phone is switched off, or they are outside a coverage area, once they switch their phone back on, or return to a coverage area, the message will be delivered and its status will turn to "Delivered" and it will display in the window below

All other messages will display in the Delivered/Failed/Unknown Result/Expired Messages window [2]

"Delivered" messages have successfully arrived on the recipient's handset. FrontlineSMS is able to track message delivery, as long as the mobile network you are using supports delivery status messages (not all do, e.g. most networks in the USA do not). Also, the phone you use to send the messages needs to be configured to request delivery reports, if supported - this is done through the PhoneManager module

"Failed" messages are messages which have been bounced by the network operator. This can mean that the number is no longer in use, or the number has been entered incorrectly in the ContactManager module

"Unknown result" indicates that FrontlineSMS has not been able to determine, from the information made available to it by your network operator, whether or not the message has been successfully sent or delivered. "Unknown result" messages may indicate network congestion, or other more serious problems (such as the network being down for some reason)

"Expired" messages are messages which, for one reason or another, have failed to be delivered after a set period of time, determined by your network operator (usually around one month). Expired messages may come back as "Failed" depending on your network

Updating the status of your messages

The MessageTracker screen automatically refreshes during general use. Sometimes it will be necessary to do a manual refresh. You may do this at any time by clicking on the Refresh buttons [3] and [4]