Help on Receving MMS
In order to use this service, your phone has to be set up to receive MMS (multimedia messages) or SMS (short message services, up to 160 characters). MMS is preferred because it can receive larger messages containing more information, and it can send voice and picture files.
For most mobile phone carriers, you need to call the support to enable MMS and SMS. SMS should work immediately after. MMS may require additional phone setup. You should try to send your friend a picture from your phone via MMS. If you succeed, MMS is working. If not, you will need to enter phone model specific MMS setting information into your phone. This can be done in a number of ways:
1. call your phone carrier for support
2. do web search on "phone brand phone model setting MMS" and follow the instructions from the matches
One example we have encountered is the Sony Ericsson phone. The user purchased unlimited SMS and MMS but the phone only worked for SMS. After calling AT&T support without a good instruction, we googled with:
sony ericsson setting MMS
and found the following url from Sony Ericsson:
http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/support/phones/detailed/phonesetupmms
By following the URL instructions, entering the phone number, the user received a text message asking him to enable the phone for MMS. After he confirmed the text message, the phone had been enabled for MMS.
If you cannot get MMS to work, you can string your SMS message segments to increase capacity. Each SMS has a capacity of 160 characters, and you can string them up to hold a longer message. For AT&T, they have provided the following web site for customers to login indicate how many 160 character SMS segments can be strung together and sent as one batch.
http://mymessages.wireless.att.com/
Go there, register, go to blocking options, and enter 10 into the BLOCK INCOMING, number of segments box:
Some mobile phones and one mobile carrier (T-mobile) do not allow sending of SMS (text messages) to email addresses directly.
To get around this, you need to embed the recipient email address into the text message content and send the message to a special phone number, called the gateway short code.
If you are a T-mobile user, to send a SMS to an email, you enter 500 as the special phone number, and you embed the email address into the message by use of '#' to seperate the email address from the subject and body of the message. For instance, to send the message "news.google.com" to web@db4.us, you send the following to 500:
web@db4.us##news.google.com
If you are a AT&T user with a phone that doesn't let you enter an email address in the recipient field, you embed the email address in front of the message body by using the space separator. For instance, to send the message "news.google.com" to web@db4.us, you send the following to phone number 121:
web@db4.us news.google.com
More special phone numbers/gateway short codes for other carriers are listed/discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_carriers_providing_SMS_transit
Disable Messages Blocking
Phone carriers may block your incoming messages if you receive too many from the same source, such as db4.us . If you have received messages from one source for a while (days) and noticed the messages stop coming, you may need to talk to your phone carrier support to re-enable the incoming messages.
For AT&T, they have provided the following web site for customers to login and "allow" email addresses to send incoming messages:
http://mymessages.wireless.att.com/
Go there, register, go to blocking options, and enter "web@db4.us" into the allow list.
