Help SMS charged as mms

[John Palmer]

Lollipop on Samsung ace4. Because I had a contact with a number joined to an email address contact, text sms was being converted to text MMS and email, and my EE bill charged these as picture messages. A picture message would incur 3 charges. This didn't happen on another phone android 2.3.6. Even though sending text directly to an email address did get sent as an email as it should. EE refunded some of the charges out of goodwill. Has anyone had this problem and is there another explanation?

 

[Unforgiven]

I can't speak to EE specifically as I'm on the wrong side of the pond for that. As far as the difference between SMS & MMS, sending to an email address that's certainly going to be treated as MMS. SMS takes advantage of some deadspace between cellular packets that allows for text ***only*** messages of a certain size between cellular devices. Once you add any images, videos, or non cell phone destination (e.g. email address) the message will be converted from SMS to MMS.

 

[John palmer]

I can't speak to EE specifically as I'm on the wrong side of the pond for that. As far as the difference between SMS & MMS, sending to an email address that's certainly going to be treated as MMS. SMS takes advantage of some deadspace between cellular packets that allows for text ***only*** messages of a certain size between cellular devices. Once you add any images, videos, or non cell phone destination (e.g. email address) the message will be converted from SMS to MMS.

My point was that the joined contact on lollipop was treated as a separate destination, there was no indication that a conversion to MMS had for taken place or another message sent. It did not happen on the older version of android. I merely wished to make others aware of a costly quirk, if that is what this was.

 

[chanchan05]

If the text message is over 3 parts long, it's automatically converted to mms on the default samsung sms app. That's actually why I use something different.

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, check your message app settings and change message app if necessary.

Another thing to watch for: many apps have an option to group texts as MMS. You want to turn that off too. There may be markets where this is helpful, but in the UK, where almost all contracts include either unlimited SMS or large numbers included, but tend to charge for MMS, anything that changes message type to MMS is unwelcome.

Most of my contacts have both phone and email addresses, so I don't understand why that would matter. My preferred message app doesn't even let me try to send SMS to an email address, so if yours does I'd see that as another reason to use something different.

 

[John palmer]

Yeah, check your message app settings and change message app if necessary.

Another thing to watch for: many apps have an option to group texts as MMS. You want to turn that off too. There may be markets where this is helpful, but in the UK, where almost all contacts include either unlimited SMS or large numbers included, but tend to charge for MMS, anything that changes message type to MMS is unwelcome.

Most of my contacts have both phone and email addresses, so I don't understand why that would matter. My preferred message app doesn't even let me try to send SMS to an email address, so if yours does I'd see that as another reason to use something different.

Thanks for that, I think I had a "joined contact" where the second contact had an email address as the primary contact instead of a mobile number. I have no evidence yet that the emails were actually delivered!