Short answer: a text message sent from an online site, a PC or a Mac can go unreceived for eight main reasons: a mistyped number, a recipient out of coverage or with the phone switched off, a full message memory, carrier spam filtering, a rejected sender number, a broken link with the paired phone, a quota reached on the free service, or a message already delivered but filed somewhere else. Check them in this order: the number first, then the sending channel, and finally the recipient's phone.
It is the most baffling situation in sending text messages over the internet: the interface displays "Message sent", the confirmation page opens, and yet the person on the other end swears nothing arrived. No error message, no bounce, nothing to hold on to.
"Sent" does not mean "received". Between the two there are at least three intermediaries that can stop the message, and none of them warns you. This article describes what really happens after the click, then walks through the causes in the order in which they are worth testing.
What exactly does "message sent" mean?
It means one thing only: the service accepted your request. Not that the text arrived on the phone.
A text message travels through a chain of successive players:
- The starting point: the sending website, the Google Messages for web window, Phone Link on Windows, or the Messages app on Mac.
- The gateway or sending carrier, which puts the message in a queue.
- The SMSC (Short Message Service Center), the message centre of the recipient's carrier, which stores the text and attempts to deliver it.
- The recipient's phone, which must be reachable on the network to receive it.
The "Message sent" you read corresponds to step 1 or 2. Steps 3 and 4 play out later, often after you have closed your tab. That is precisely why a delivery receipt is not guaranteed on a free send: we covered this in detail in our article on what a delivery receipt really proves.
The SMSC, for its part, does not discard the message straight away. It keeps it for a validity period (the validity period parameter of the GSM standard) and retries delivery at regular intervals. That duration is set by the carrier and is generally counted in hours, sometimes days. Hence a common phenomenon: text messages that all arrive at once when a phone that had been switched off is turned back on.
Worth remembering before you go hunting for a fault: wait 15 minutes. A delivery delay of a few minutes is perfectly ordinary and does not amount to a failure.
Is the number written in the right format?
This is the first cause, and by far the most common. An online service that covers several countries has no way of guessing that "06 12 34 56 78" is French.
The format expected by almost every site, gateway and API is the international E.164 format: +33612345678. You replace the leading 0 with +33, and remove spaces, dots, dashes and brackets.
There are two possible behaviours when faced with a badly formed number:
- the form rejects it — the ideal case, you see the error;
- the form assumes a default country, accepts the number, displays "sent" and the message disappears into thin air.
The second case explains the vast majority of "texts sent but never received". The classic mistakes: a +33 followed by the 0 (+330612…), a 0033 stuck in front of the 0, one digit too many or too few, a landline number instead of a mobile (numbers starting 01 to 05 do not receive text messages in France), or a number copied from a spreadsheet that swallowed the leading zero. If you manage lists, we have devoted a full guide to writing a number in +33 format.
For regular sends from a computer, the safest approach is still to type the number from a reliable source rather than copy it off a screen: a small paper phone directory sitting next to the keyboard prevents the transcription errors we keep repeating with a badly memorised number.
Is the recipient's phone really reachable?
A text message does not travel through walls. If the device is switched off, in airplane mode, without network or in a dead zone, the SMSC holds the message and retries later.
Situations that block reception on the recipient's side:
| Situation | Is the message lost? | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Phone switched off | No | Delivered when switched back on, within the validity period |
| Airplane mode | No | Delivered as soon as it is turned off |
| Area with no coverage | No | Retried for as long as the validity period runs |
| Full message memory | Often yes | The phone refuses the message |
| SIM card removed or faulty | No, then yes | Delivered after reinsertion |
| Line cancelled or number recycled | Yes | The number no longer belongs to that person |
| Landline device (01 to 05) | Yes | No text message reception |
Full memory is the most underestimated cause, especially on basic phones where both the SIM and the device store a limited number of messages. On a feature phone with buttons, text storage sometimes amounts to just a few dozen messages. If the recipient uses a mobile phone with large buttons, that is the first thing to have them check: deleting old conversations immediately frees up reception.
Another hardware-side lead: an old, oxidised or poorly inserted SIM card causes intermittent network drops. A SIM card reader, or simply a replacement SIM supplied by the carrier, resolves the cases where the phone only latches onto the network half the time.
Was the message filtered as spam?
Yes, it is possible — and it is now a major cause of failure for messages sent from a free site or a gateway.
French carriers filter text message traffic to fight smishing. That filtering relies in particular on the 33700 scheme, the reporting service for unwanted text messages and calls run by the Association française du multimédia mobile (French Mobile Multimedia Association), known as AF2M, together with the carriers — see 33700.fr. Reported messages feed blocklists covering sender numbers, embedded links and sometimes text templates.
Concrete consequences for a legitimate send:
- a message containing a shortened link (bit.ly and the like) stands a high chance of being stopped: it is the signature most used by fraudsters;
- a bulk send from a sender number shared by thousands of users inherits that number's bad reputation;
- a text stuffed with capitals, urgency and sensitive words ("URGENT", "account blocked", "click here") looks like a scam, because that is exactly what scams look like.
The fix is editorial before it is technical: write things out in full, use the complete link rather than a shortened one, and identify yourself in the very first words. If your activity involves regular sends, a dedicated sender via a gateway solves the reputation problem — that is one of the arguments in favour of moving to an API, discussed in our comparison in the comparisons section.
Conversely, filtering can also happen on the phone. Android and iOS file messages from unknown senders in a separate tab ("Spam & blocked" in Google Messages, "Unknown Senders" on iOS). The text did arrive, but nobody saw it. Before concluding that it was lost, have those folders checked: it is the easiest cause to rule out.
Does sending from a PC or a Mac depend on the phone?
Yes, for three of the four common methods. And when the link is broken, the message stays stuck in the window without anyone understanding why.
Two technical families need to be distinguished:
Mirrors — Google Messages for web, Phone Link on Windows, Messages on Mac (for non-iMessage texts). The computer sends nothing: it passes an instruction to the phone, which sends the message from your own number. If the phone is switched off, out of battery, offline, or if the pairing session has expired, the message is written but never leaves. Google Messages for web closes the session after a period of inactivity; Phone Link loses the connection as soon as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi drops.
Online sending services — the computer goes through the service's gateway. The phone plays no part, but the message leaves from a number that is not yours, and the recipient cannot reply directly.
Quick diagnosis for a mirror:
- Check that the phone is switched on and unlocked.
- Check that it is properly connected to the internet (mobile data or Wi-Fi).
- Open the Messages app on the phone: does the message appear in the conversation? If it is marked as not sent, the problem is on the phone side, not the computer side.
- Re-pair if necessary (a new QR code for Google Messages for web).
The silliest cause of all: a phone at 3% battery left in another room. Keeping a USB-C charger on the desk, next to the computer, single-handedly eliminates a good share of "texts that won't send from the PC". For long sessions away from a socket, a compact power bank does the same job. We have set out what remains possible when the phone is not within reach.
Has the free service's quota been reached?
Often, yes — and the error message is rarely explicit.
Free text-message sending services cap volumes to prevent abuse: a number of messages per hour or per day, per IP address, per recipient number. When the limit is crossed, depending on the service, the message is silently refused, queued indefinitely, or the send is simply ignored while a confirmation is displayed anyway.
Signs that a ceiling has been reached:
- the first messages of the session go through, the next ones do not;
- the same number receives one message then nothing for hours;
- a group send only partly succeeds.
If you are writing to several recipients, it is better to know the constraints in advance: we reviewed them in the article on sending a group text from a PC.
Is the message too long or badly encoded?
An overly long text is not lost, but it may arrive truncated, split into jumbled pieces, or cost more than expected on a gateway.
A reminder of the rules:
- a standard text message holds 160 characters in GSM-7 encoding;
- as soon as one character falls outside that alphabet — most emojis, certain rare accented letters, the "curly" quotation marks copied from a word processor — the message switches to UCS-2 and the limit drops to 70 characters;
- beyond that, the message is split into concatenated segments (153 characters per segment in GSM-7, 67 in UCS-2), which the receiving phone reassembles… in principle.
In practice, some older phones and some gateways handle concatenation poorly: the recipient receives three messages out of order, or only the first one. Copy-pasting from office software is the classic trap: typographic apostrophes and em dashes are enough to switch the encoding without you noticing. The site's SMS character counter shows the detected encoding before you send, and we explain the mechanism in detail in the article on emojis and the 70-character limit.
In what order should you check?
From the least costly to the most costly. This sequence rules out almost every case in a matter of minutes.
- Wait 15 minutes. A delay is not a loss.
- Reread the number, character by character, in
+33format with no zero. - Have the "spam" and "unknown senders" folders checked on the recipient's phone.
- Test on your own number from the same service, with the same text: if you receive it, the service works and the problem is on the recipient's side.
- Test with a text containing no link or emoji, 120 characters maximum: if that message goes through and the other does not, it is content filtering.
- Test from another channel (the phone directly, another service) to isolate the gateway.
- Check the pairing link if you are going through a mirror.
- Call the recipient: their line may simply be out of service.
For messages that matter — a summons, an appointment reminder, family news — the only truly reliable method is not to rely on a single channel. A text message backed up by a phone call for critical information avoids most nasty surprises; it is also the rule we recommend for appointment reminder texts.
When is the problem the phone itself?
When all text messages stop arriving, not just yours. At that point the diagnosis changes in nature.
The leads, in order:
- Saturated memory: clear out old conversations and attachments.
- Blocked number: check the list of blocked senders in the messaging app's settings.
- Badly configured default messaging app: on Android, two messaging apps installed can compete over reception.
- Text forwarding enabled: an old forwarding setting can divert messages.
- SIM card: remove it, clean the contacts, reinsert it; test it in another device.
- Carrier issue: check the carrier's network status page, or call customer service.
- Damaged screen or device: a dropped phone may have an antenna fault. A tempered glass screen protector will not prevent that kind of failure, but it limits the drops that cause it.
If nothing works, the Arcep (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse — the French regulatory authority for electronic communications, postal services and press distribution) provides the J'alerte l'Arcep ("I alert Arcep") platform for reporting a persistent malfunction of an electronic communications service, once you have first raised it with your carrier.
Updated on 12 November 2026
The volume limits of free services, the session durations of mirrors and carriers' filtering rules change without public announcement. The orders of magnitude given here apply as of this date; number formats (E.164) and encoding rules (GSM-7, UCS-2) are standardised and do not change.
Frequently asked questions
How long can a text message take to arrive?
Under normal conditions, a few seconds to a minute. If the recipient's phone is unreachable, the carrier's message centre keeps the text and retries delivery for the duration of the message's validity period, which is counted in hours or even days depending on the carrier.
How can I tell whether my text was really received?
A free send from a website generally provides no delivery guarantee whatsoever. Only paid gateways and APIs return a genuine delivery report. For important information, the most reliable confirmation is still the recipient's reply.
Why doesn't my text containing a link arrive?
Because shortened links are the most common signature of fraudulent text messages and are filtered as a priority by carriers. Write out the full address, without a shortener, and identify yourself in the very first words of the message.
Can a text message be lost for good?
Yes, in three cases: the validity period expired before the phone became reachable again, the recipient's message memory was full, or the message was blocked by a spam filter. None of these cases generates any notification for the sender.
Why doesn't a text sent from my PC appear on my phone?
Because mirror-type methods (Google Messages for web, Phone Link, Messages on Mac) route through the phone: if the pairing session has expired or the device is offline, the message stays pending in the computer window without ever being sent.
