MMS MM7 SOAP Problems with Vodafone UK

Topic Keywords: MM7, operator MMSC, SOAP, Vodafone

If you’re trying to use NowSMS to interface with the Vodafone UK MMSC over MM7, you may be experiencing a problem where the Vodafone MMSC is reporting SOAP errors, indicating that the SOAP headers cannot be accessed.

This appears to be a bug in their MMSC. The Vodafone UK MMSC does not like the MIME boundary text that NowSMS generates. While the MIME boundary used by NowSMS correctly conforms to the specification, the choice of characters in the boundary appear to be causing a program error in this operator MMSC.

At this point, we’re not sure which vendor MMSC Vodafone is using, or if perhaps it is a problematic piece of middleware, so this may affect other mobile operators that are using the same MMSC product.

An updated version of NowSMS contains a work-around for this problem, generating alternate text for the MIME boundary, which is acceptable to this MMSC. This update is applied for NowSMS v2008.10.01 and later versions. Currently this update is available for download at the following link: https://nowsms.com/download/nowsmsupdate.zip.