Text messages

Like you I get and receive text messages on my mobile (cell) phone.

Where do they go when deleted?

You mean when you delete the msg off of the phone, or when they get deleted after they get sent to you via the SMS server at the telco?

On edit:
If you mean on the phone, you may wish to disclose the make & model of phone.

Deleted from phone which is an Alcatel

They dont go anywhere - they are not physical things. A phone is just like a computer. Lets say you get a message that 12 kilobytes big. When you press delete the phone just marks that 12 kilobytes as empty and will over-write it when it needs to.

There are two different questions you might be asking.
[ol]
[li]When I have a message in my Inbox folder, and I delete it, what’s the name of the folder that it gets moved to? Is it called “Deleted” or is it called “Trash” or is it called something else?[/li]
[li]When I have a message in my Inbox folder, and I delete it, so that the message is not anywhere on my phone anymore, where did it go?[/li][/ol]If you mean #1, I have no idea what the answer is for an Alcatel. If you mean #2, then the answer (for any phone) is: It didn’t go anywhere. The storage area where the message was kept was wiped clean; the mixed up “0” bytes and “1” bytes were all changed to zeroes.

Does it really wipe the message clean with zeros? Or does it do what file systems usually do, which is just delete the pointer to the data and overwrites it later, when that memory space is needed?

pulykamell - to be honest, you have a good point. I don’t know.

But I do know that zeroes and ones are bits, not bytes.

I always thought twitter was where old texts go to die.

I thought “empty” in flash memory was actually all 1 bits, not 0s.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Away.

Yes, I believe the default state in flash memory is set to 1. Either way, I’m curious as to how it works with cell phones. As far as I understand it, flash memory also is erased blocks at a time, rather than bytes or words at a time, and I don’t know how this sort of memory would generally be stored and whether the message itself would be erased when you delete it. I’m guessing not. At least with camera flash cards, you can erase or format the card, but, unless you do a low-level format, you’re not erasing most of the data on the flash card itself until you actually overwrite it with other pictures.

That is not empty that is erased. Empty is something that the file system keeps track of. The file system may or may not erase the memory when it is emptied. The file system could only erase the memory just prior to writing or it could erase it when it is emptied. I can see advantages of either method.

I’m guessing that it does the same thing an OS like Windows does. It marks the memory as available but doesn’t physically overwrite it. Spending the time and energy to overwrite it would be wasteful. So I guess, in theory, someone with the right tools could retrieve messages that have been “deleted” but haven’t actually been overwritten with new data yet.

Correct. As evidenced by the large number of commercial applications available for exactly this purpose. Google ‘SIM Card Data Recovery’ - there are lots of them…