Android messages RCS stops working when I am using Pihole

[MarkIannucci]

Expected Behaviour:

An update to Android's messaging app now uses RCS if your network supports it when sending messages to others who are also RCS users. RCS enables read receipts and typing and delivery notifications. It is the equivalent to iMessage and I would like it to work when I'm using pihole.

Actual Behaviour:

Unfortunately, when I enable my phone to use pihole, RCS stops working and all of my messages default to SMS

Debug Token:

Your debug token is: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/qbp55fptrj!

[Mcat12]

Pi-hole does not directly interact with RCS. The only way it could interfere is if you or one of your block lists are blocking a domain it needs, in which case, see this FAQ:

How do I determine what domain an ad is coming from?

Block ads or fix broken sites This FAQ is written in the context of finding out how to block an ad that isn't blocked automatically, but the same steps can be used to troubleshoot issues with sites that don't function properly. An example is that sometimes certain payment gateways try to collect metrics on the sale, but these domains are blocked by Pi-hole, so the payment cannot be processed. Also, some links send you through several referrers and if one of them is blocked, you may land on a …

[MarkIannucci]

Thank you for your response.

I'm not seeing anything recently blocked that appears related to RCS; to the contrary, I'm seeing a lot of stuff to jibecloud.net being allowed through. Your comment is making me think that perhaps this is due to my setup.

I followed Ranjann Patel's instructions to configure pi-hole on a Google Compute Engine VM with split tunnel OpenVPN to route my DNS requests. I bet interrupting that traffic may be my root cause. I'm going to continue investigating and will post back with what I find.

Thank you for the gentle reminder to think about my problem a bit more thoroughly.

[MarkIannucci]

@Mcat12, I configured a windows docker container to fire up Pi-hole on the same network as my phone, and when I did that, and started using it to resolve my phone's DNS queries, I did not have any trouble with RCS messaging.

So I can confirm that the issue that I'm having is related split tunneling my traffic to the Pi-hole I'm running in a Google Cloud VM with Open VPN. I've opened an issue in the github repo and will work through figuring out how to get it to work there.

I also noticed that it made a lot fewer requests to jibecloud.net servers when the requests were coming from the same network as the device, so I think that may have something to do with RCS continuing to work with the docker container setup.

Thanks again for getting me to rethink the problem.

[MarkIannucci]

Just to close this out, I figured out which app to add to the OpenVPN white list, and opened this Pull Request to add it to the master. It was Carrier Services.