What to do if a BBM contact is stuck as pending

No one wants to be stuck in BBM Purgatory. Are you in it? Open up BBM and scroll to the bottom. If you have any contacts that are still pending, and have been pending for a while, congratulations. You’re in BBM Purgatory. While it might be our natural tendency to think that the contact is ignoring us, this largely isn’t the case. There are reasons that a contact might be stuck on pending that don’t involve ill thoughts on their part. Over at BlackBerry Rocks, Mauricio has some causes and solutions, which come from BlackBerry Knowledge Base 12319. Let’s take a look. For starters, we’ll stick with the solutions. According to his account there are five possible causes, beyond BBM Purgatory, for a contact to be stuck on pending. Chances are, though, that you have no idea what the cause is. What you want are answers. What’s the best way to get that contact added to your BBM? The easiest solution is to send a PIN message to see if it actually delivers. To do this, go to Messages and then click menu. Select Compose PIN (which will be under Compose Other in OS 6) and then enter in the email address of the recipient. If the PIN goes through, then there aren’t any network issues. In that case, you might be in BBM Purgatory. But maybe you’re not. There are other possible errors. If you requested the BBM contact via email, it might just be a matter of the email going into the recipient’s junk mail folder. I’m not sure how this works, since you’re notified of contact requests through BBM (so this would have to be a light BBM user). You can kindly ask them to check their spam folder. I actually suggest doing a wipe and restore — not on the whole system, but just on BBM. It’s easy, and it doesn’t involve any further communication with the pending contact. When you are in BBM, go to Options and then scroll down to Backup Management. Click the first option to back up your contacts. Then remove and reinstall BBM. Check KB03621 for the rundown on that. Then restore with the second option under Backup Management. Other than that, consider that you might have sent the request to the wrong email address or PIN. I’m not shy to admit that it has happened to me before. Also consider that the person might no longer have a BlackBerry. That has also happened to me. If you have any other questions or solutions, fire away in the comments.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.