android.provider.Telephony.SMS_RECEIVED won't fire when SMS comes from an e-mail

Question

My BroadcastReceiver works just fine when the device receives an SMS from another regular phone, but if the SMS is sent through the carrier's e-mail gateway like "[email protected]", then the message is received on the device normally as an SMS, but the android.provider.Telephony.SMS_RECEIVED action does not fire and my BroadcatReceiver never gets notified. Is there something I'm missing?

<receiver android:name=".services.IncomingSmsBroadcastReceiver" >
        <intent-filter android:priority="2147483647" >
            <action android:name="android.provider.Telephony.SMS_RECEIVED" >
            </action>
        </intent-filter>
</receiver>

Answer 1

I found something interesting about how carriers handle e-mails, which in turn was causing wrong behavior in my if statements, which in turn caused the problem stated in this question.

Apparently, when cell phone service providers handle e-mails to your phone, they send it through a random short number: like 4043 for example. In your BroadcastReceiver, when you get a hold of the SmsMessage, you should always use SmsMessage.getDisplayOriginatingAddress() and SmsMessage.getDisplayMessageBody(). These will give you the e-mail address that sent it and the proper body respectively. Unlike SmsMessage.getOriginatingAddress() and SmsMessage.getMessageBody() which will give you instead the random number mentioned previously and the body containing the e-mail address mixed up with the actual content.