It turns out I hadn't done the emoji fix and had got along for over a year with a new-to-me N900 not noticing killed emoji SMSs. Being a grownup is boring or I was just missing out on fun SMSs until my wife noticed them on her Lineage Oneplus and tried to send me a few as a test. The SMSs with emoji were silently killed
Installed by sudo dpkg -i for both .deb files as the software updater errored out
I used .deb files from this TMO post, first the straight libsms and then the libsms mod
https://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?...&postcount=132
it didn't work until I rebooted
but now when I get SMS with one of the newer android (LineageOS-14) style emojis I can see the SMS text and the emojis appear as blank boxes on my N900.
So just affirming that newer emoji SMS in summer 2017 still works with this fix.