[degrees57]

I don't think they keep them for very long. I know that my organization looked at purchasing Smarsh, which hooks in to the API that providers present so that Smarsh can do it's archiving. IIRC, there was a short time limit (not a whole lot of days) on being able to retrieve the messages from the providers.

Also, if I'm a provider, keeping all those text messages is going to be a more of a liability than a benefit. It's an expense for storage and retrieval. I'm not sure they would really make any money off of maintaining a long history; it would be super rare that this would pay off. Better to just state that "after n days, they are gone, we're done. Archiving is up to you, the customer."