Hi Sue! Thanks for sharing how the problem is fixed. That will be helpful to other users that are experiencing the same problem. :)

Earlier I asked why my notifications never went off for my SMS messages. I spoke with the Samsung agent, and he had me download something so that he could get into my phone, and he found that it was Max Optimizer that I had downloaded that was preventing the notifications from sounding. When I uninstalled Max optimizer, I once again started getting notifications for my messages. Just thought I'd share this with everyone.