The sim has been missing since before xmas.
It has just received some texts!
It has had wifi access…
How does this work?
The Iphone phone used to be on T-Mobile and its number was PAC code transferred from T-M to another (Nokia 1020) phone which is on Vodafone, late Dec 2014. That Nokia phone should have received those messages (because it has the number now) but it didn’t!
Spooky!
Somebody suggested a service called I-message but that would It would mean that somewhere must exist a linkage between some kind of the recipient’s internet identity (which would have to be the email address, unless Apple are doing some sort of tracking and message delivery based on the phone ID) and his/her mobile number. If it was done via email, you get no notification of delivery (unless using various other means like auto opening of coded 1px graphic links e.g MSGTAG and the recipient has not blocked opening 3rd party graphics). No incoming emails appeared on that phone.
That is bizzare because it would mean that if you send somebody a text (a plain old GSM SMS) it is actually getting delivered via the internet and therefore without any way of knowing that it will ever be delivered. Or does the system (which has never been consciously enabled on this old phone, AFAIK) implement a receipt, and a fallback to SMS if not received within a certain time?
Not to mention possible roaming costs 
If I-message really does this, who keeps track of you moving your SIM card or your mobile number to another phone. Nobody sends that info to Apple… or do they get it via the daily reports from the phone? In this case they obviously did not discover that the Iphone had no SIM so could not have possibly received normal SMS. Another point is that the number of a SIM card cannot be discovered by any process running on the phone; it is purely a configuration item in the cellular network.
I can see various ways this could be worked but it is sure to break if the number gets transferred to a non-Apple phone because the new phone isn’t going to tell Apple about itself.
Never tried it w/o a SIM card, but it’s probably an iMessage. If you send a text from one Apple device to another, it first tries to send it via iMessage (i.e. internet), failing that via SMS. If you look closely, the phone actually tells you. Only explanation I have…..
You can set up SMS relaying from one iOS device to another and AFAIK it’s set by default on all devices registered on same iTunes account.
no roaming cost for imessages. i messages between ios devices are free and since there is no sim card they will be sent via wifi anyway.
What colour were the messages?
Green is old plain text message and blue is an iMessage
If you go to the iMessage settings on your phone, you will see an option called ‘receive messages at’, and I bet you’ll find your old number listed there.
The person who sent the message must have sent it from an Apple device. Apple think your number is still registered for iMessage and so delivered it to your old phone.
In this case you still have your old phone, so you can just turn it off. If you didn’t have your old phone any more, there’s a tool on the Apple website to de-register the number:-
imessage can be registered to mobile phone numer AND/OR to an eMail address
Sure, but in this case, it’s the mobile number that’s probably causing Peter’s issue.
Either way, if Peter isn’t using an iThing has his phone any more, he’s going to want to de-register iMessage.
OK… got my hands on this old Iphone now.
Yes they were i-messages! They aren’t all blue; some are grey. And they were arriving for a whole month while the phone was on wifi and with no SIM. I am pretty sure the people who sent them (ordinary non-IT people) had no idea of what this i-message thing does because some complained that the messages were not being replied to. They were getting my GF’s (the phone’s owner) normal texts during that time and ought to have realised those were not i-messages so maybe it should have clicked that she doesn’t have that capability anymore.
However, I cannot find where you config the relationship between the i-messages and your mobile number. This must live on Apple’s server. There is only one config item I can see; under Settings, and you can turn i-message on or off. Obviously I have turned it off. There is no “de-register” option. But surely this means that if this phone was sold on Ebay (as it will be soon) and somebody just turned it back on, the phone would become visible for i-messages to anybody who gets it, under its old GSM number, and if somebody then sends a text message to that number (my GF) that message will be actually delivered to the phone’s new owner. Will a wipe of the phone prevent that?
If that works as I describe, the phone must send a message to Apple whenever the i-message enable/disable slider is moved, to control the distribution of i-messages which people send to Apple’s server. There must be an interesting safeguard in the way the previous owner’s identity is linked / unlinked. It cannot be just on the phone’s serial number, otherwise a new owner could simply enable it and get all the i-messages which people were previously sending you. I can think of some interesting pitfalls
And if I wipe the phone, using Reset / Erase All Content and Settings, then sell it, and somebody re-enables the i-messaging, will that be sufficient?
I can imagine huge numbers of non-IT people having fun with this 
The obvious point is that if you lose your phone, and buy a new one and pop a replacement SIM card into it (which is what nearly 100% of people would do) the thief will still be getting your old i-messages, and if he stole your phone deliberately (I mean he knew who you were) then he would obviously make sure he had continuous wifi connectivity so as to not miss any
haha ;-)
Just reset the phone and delete all settings and data. After that it’s like an unused new phone.
