Position sent through mapshare page, counted as 45 messages!

I sent a position via my mapshare page to my inReach mini 2 device. After clicking "Send" I received 45 identical messages on my inReach mini 2 device and was charged for 45 messages. Is this normal? No, it isn't at all! Has anyone else experienced the same problem?

0 twolpert over 1 year ago

Not normal. It is rare but not unheard of for a single message to appear more than once on the device. When this does happen, it is usually limited to one or two extra copies. I have never been clear if those are generated by Garmin, or if they are an artifact of some type of error handling in the Iridium network. If you were charged, it was definitely the Garmin servers in this case.

Open a support ticket. Then talk to the billing people about having the charges removed.

0 Cubix85 over 1 year ago in reply to twolpert

Yes, I have been charged 0.55€ * 45 for messages I never sent.

I have contacted both tech support and billing people, they are investigating this issue...let's see if they will refund me and fix the problem. In the meantime I have disabled the "Send position" feature from my mapshare page, to prevent someone (or me) from using that button again, triggering a new expensive "message loop".

Another strange thing is that I see these messages on the inReach and in the android explore app, but not in my inbox folder on the explore website. But if I send a new message from my mobile number to my inReach, all these messages are also visible again from the explore website.

The whole synchronisation mechanism between explore website, app and device works very badly!

0 twolpert over 1 year ago in reply to Cubix85

Not sure what you mean about the inbox. Do you mean that only ONE of the 45 messages appeared, none of them appeared, or something else?

In the past, when I have seen multiple copies of the same message on the device, I saw one (and only one) copy of the message in the inbox. That said, these were "normal" messages - not something generated from MapShare.

0 MushyTomato over 1 year ago

Yes, I've had this happen. Once. I received about 20-odd messages and as a result never used that function again. I suspect something wonky about the web UI or underlying JavaScript that's prone to register multiple triggers from a single mouse click, but that's just a wild guess. Definitely contact Garmin and ask for your money back, or they'll never fix it (chances of which are low as it is).