messages arriving on Chinese characters

@AnonaMiss Does this happen if you send a "plain text" message, such as "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."?

I'd bet it doesn't.

You're using some emoticons, when this happens, correct?  

If so, you should investigate from this angle, there's a high probability that your keyboard (or other emoticon tool) is using non-standard codes.

@camperchuck Yep, no question in my mind, the text parser (a server-side implementation) had an issue with some newer emoticons, which was fixed.

Could it have a problem with some other new ones (or an animated GIF, or ...)?

Yep, and probably, eventually will.  But I bet most of these get fixed, with almost no customer interaction, just test teams staying on top of things.

It's a tough problem, trying to be inclusive of new MMS constructs, but protecting against the possibility of mis-parsing a new set of (unknown) things is a tough spot.  There are other things they could do to shore it up a bit more, programmatically, absolutely, but sometimes a "filtering" mechanism can cause more headaches than  it solves, particularly in a VERY latency-balanced system, like SMS/MMS...

@AnonaMiss Interesting, so what "characters" are you using, to repro this?

I'm curious, myself.

I suspect if you take it into a shop (I'm not that far from Seattle, and there are a LOT of AT&T shops in the greater area, most are "official"), they'll just switch out your default keyboard.

This would likely "fix" the issue, by obfuscating it, at least for now.

I am curious as to how you're getting the characters, what message(s) your'e sending?

All my texts are coming in Chinese all of a sudden.  Can someone please assist in fixing this? 

This just happened to me. I sent a somewhat long text to someone and they said, "I don't speak Chinese."

They sent me a screenshot of a paragraph in all Chinese symbols. 

I have Android and they have iPhone.

4 years later....and It's still happening. What is going on? do I need to find a more superior service provider? or is AT&T just going to slip insurance on my phone bill? SMH