7nationArnie I’ve seen that brought up a few times too, but from what I understand that’s not really how it works.
Carriers can hold onto METADATA for texts, basically the bare-bones info about your messages like who you texted, when the message was sent, the phone numbers involved and in some cases the cell tower or GPS location where the message was sent from. But that’s all they keep.
The actual content of the message (the part you care about)isn’t stored long-term and usually gets wiped pretty quickly for privacy and storage reasons.
So even if you log into your carrier’s portal (like Verizon or AT&T )you’re not going to see the full conversation or message body. At best you might see a call/text log with timestamps and numbers, but not what was said. And unless you’re law enforcement with a court order, there’s no way to request the content once it's been purged.
Long story short: you can’t just retrieve deleted text messages on iPhone from your carrier, it’s not like a backup service. If it was ever backed up that’s a different story.
