:smack: I deleted all my text messages on my phone and I read something saying that they can be recovered. Recovering deleted text messages are sometimes done to find evidence in court cases, like the Kobe Bryant case…
Well back to the question, is there anyway for someone to recover my deleted text messages without me knowing? (besides getting it from my sim card) I am pretty nervous about that.
BTW I am the owner of the account…
My WAG would be that it would be nearly impossible to retrieve them from your phone. If your phone merely marks the space used by those messages as free, then reading out the raw contents of your phone memory could lead to someone resconstructing most of the message. That would be extremely expensive and time consuming though, plus the bits used by your old messages is likely overwritten by incoming messages in fairly short order. You’re also unlikely to miss someone doing this. 
Much more likely, your phone company keeps track of all messages sent to and from all users. It would still be expensive and time consuming, but has a much higher chance of success. Plus, you’d never know about it. (That’s what was done in the Kobe Bryant case).
Hmm, so if someone were to call my phone company and ask for a record of my sent and received text messages, could that slide without going through me first?
What process would one have to go through to recover this information?
I don’t think that just anyone could walk in off the street and ask the phone company for your messages. It would require a court order, or at the very least a request from a law enforcement agency.
I just sent some messages and received some messages that I don’t want read, and I want them to stay unread. I am pretty sure Sprint doesn’t keep track of SMS messages, but I’m not sure, they used to be kept on the website, but they discontinued that… Is there anyone that uses sprint that might know if they can recover deleted text messages via phone call or e-mail?
I disagree with your characterization of “nearly impossible.” It would actually be pretty easy for someone with physical access to the phone, developers tools, and a knowledge of the filesystem to get that data out.
In addition, your assumption about the files soon being overwritten may or may not be valid. If the phone is storing the messages on flash, a well-designed filesystem will try to balance the load on flash by not constantly overwriting the same memory (traditionally, flash wore out after relatively few write/erase cycles, so constantly using the same memory could lead to premature failure. This is less of a problem now, but still more of a consideration than it would be for memory or a hard disk.). So the memory may not be overwritten until all of the SMS memory has been filled, however much that is.
However, the above is only worrisome if someone has physical access to the phone and strong motivation to read deleted messages. The only way to be sure would be to physically destroy all the memory on your phone.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if carriers kept records of all messages sent and received. Given the size of messages, it wouldn’t take much to store them all, and they might want to use them for data mining or something.
FWIW: I don’t know about regular civilians being able to retrieve messages transmitted but, in the US, CALEA (a piece of legislation) requires telecommunications companies to retain records of pretty much all telecom transactions (technical, not financial - CALEA stands for Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act). In my days with a law enforcement agency, we intercepted plenty of SMS messages.
Don’t know, however, if they’ll grant that privilege to a customer.
:eek: I gotta run. Gotta go write 512 MB of text messages real quick!
Can’t say for Sprint … But I used to work for a wireless text messaging carrier, and every message sent on the network was stored for several months before being purged. I handled escalated billing disputes, and I’d pull messages from the archives to document usage charges that were under dispute. I think I had the most fun handling those disputes than any others. There was the one guy who had messages in his queue from his wife … and his other wife … and his fiancee. But my favorite was on the account for a sports agency, where I found actual blackmail text messages sent to the agent for an extremely well-known athlete, threatening to inform the press that he was the father of her baby if he didn’t pay up. Quote: “Bill Cosby wouldn’t pay, but <deleted> will!” I’ve never heard a whiff of public scandal about this particular player, so either they paid her off, convinced her that she was risking jail time, or had her whacked …