T-Mobile to Go -- texting to email

[michael05]

Hello,

I've been with T-Mobile to Go for about 2 years, but I was on a really old phone I got when I was with Cingular about 5 years ago. It's nearly dead, so time for a new phone.

But today I finally stepped into the modern world and picked up a Shadow. I still plan to use it with T-Mobile to Go, since I don't use my phone much (maybe $10/month in total T-Mobile to Go spending with a $100 card), and I don't really need all the bells and whistles.

My wife loves my new Shadow, and she wants to get one now too. She's currently doing prepaid with Virgin Mobile, with about the same usage pattern as me.

So here's the problem. She's used to sending text messages from her phone to her boss's email address. She can do this just fine with Virgin Mobile. However, when we tried it from my Shadow using T-Mobile to Go, it didn't seem to work. I got the following error:

Error: Cannot recognize one or more recipients or the address is not valid. Would you like to send the message anyway?
So I'd say Yes, and then this error would pop up:
Error: Cannot send to email recipients from the Text Message account. Cance the message, select an email account, then try again.

Interestingly enough, if I send an email from my computer to my phone using the @tmomail.net address, then if I choose Reply from the phone settings, I can send an email back to my computer. But if I'm not replying to an email from the computer, it doesn't work.

Does anyone know if 1) there's a way to send a text message to an e-mail address using T-Mobile to Go? Or 2) is there a way to set up full email with T-Mobile to Go? (I'm guessing no, but I might as well ask. I did a bunch of searches on the latter and I see $1/day for Sidekick users, but no mention of anything else. I also tried setting up my Gmail account in my Shadow using POP to see if it worked, and it just kept timing out. And I have POP configured correctly b/c I can get my Gmail in POP to my computer.)

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[Quint101]

You can send email from SMS from your prepaid phone. I do this all the time from my prepaid phone. I just select the email address option when sending from my Motorola V195. I can send email as SMS to my phone as well. I use alias@tmomail.net and phone#@tmomail.net and and the emails show up as SMS or MMS. If the message show up as MMS and it contains only text, you're only charged $0.05, the rate of an incoming text message

My phone is not capable of adding email accounts, so someone will have to chime in on that.

SMS = text message, MMS = picture message

[michael05]

Originally Posted by Quint101

You can send email from SMS from your prepaid phone. I do this all the time from my prepaid phone. I just select the email address option when sending from my Motorola V195. I can send email as SMS to my phone as well. I use alias@tmomail.net and phone#@tmomail.net and and the emails show up as SMS or MMS. If the message show up as MMS and it contains only text, you're only charged $0.05, the rate of an incoming text message

My phone is not capable of adding email accounts, so someone will have to chime in on that.

SMS = text message, MMS = picture message

Hmmm...so could this be a phone thing, where it's just the Shadow that can't do it? Or maybe smartphones can't do it in general, since they expect you to set it up with email and send that way?

Or maybe I'm just doing something wrong with my Shadow, and there's a setting I can change or a different way to try sending it?

[Charlyee]

Wirelessly posted (Treo 750: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.6) UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0)

Originally Posted by michael05

Hmmm...so could this be a phone thing, where it's just the Shadow that can't do it? Or maybe smartphones can't do it in general, since they expect you to set it up with email and send that way?

Or maybe I'm just doing something wrong with my Shadow, and there's a setting I can change or a different way to try sending it?

I can only answer one of your questions - it is not a "Smartphone thing". I send SMS to my work E-Mail all the time. I put the E-Mail address in the "To" field. I didn't have to change any settings

[michael05]

Originally Posted by Charlyee

Wirelessly posted (Treo 750: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.6) UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0)

I can only answer one of your questions - it is not a "Smartphone thing". I send SMS to my work E-Mail all the time. I put the E-Mail address in the "To" field. I didn't have to change any settings

And this is on a Treo using T-Mobile to Go?

[Charlyee]

Wirelessly posted (Treo 750: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.6) UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0)

Originally Posted by michael05

And this is on a Treo using T-Mobile to Go?

It is a Treo on at&t postpaid. Sorry, I was only trying to say it is not the characteristic of a Smartphone just because they are intended to be E-Mail devices. I figured Quint had verified that you can from a T-Mobile ToGo.

Sorry for the confusion.

BTW: Welcome to WA

[SmArTeStChIlD421]

thats definiely a Windows Mobile message......i get this a lot and its usually a glitch but your phone is probably looking for a number and when you give it letters its saying this isnt right.......but you should be able to send texts to emails

[michael05]

OK, I finally broke down and called T-Mobile support. It was one of the quickest support calls I've ever had with a gadget I've owned. They had an answer for me within a few seconds.

The answer is, instead of putting the email address in the "To" field, you put the number 500. Nothing more. That tells the system that you're trying to send it through the T-Mobile email gateway.

Then you put the email address you want to send to as the first item in the body of the text message. I tried it on the phone with the support rep, and it worked immediately.

[Quint101]

Originally Posted by michael05

OK, I finally broke down and called T-Mobile support. It was one of the quickest support calls I've ever had with a gadget I've owned. They had an answer for me within a few seconds.

The answer is, instead of putting the email address in the "To" field, you put the number 500. Nothing more. That tells the system that you're trying to send it through the T-Mobile email gateway.

Then you put the email address you want to send to as the first item in the body of the text message. I tried it on the phone with the support rep, and it worked immediately.

I forgot about the 500 SMS address option... When I had my old Nokia 5190 back in 1999 in the VoiceStream and Powertel days, I had to use the 500 address option. Nice to know that there's more than one way to send SMS to email.

[Quint101]

Originally Posted by michael05

OK, I finally broke down and called T-Mobile support. It was one of the quickest support calls I've ever had with a gadget I've owned. They had an answer for me within a few seconds.

The answer is, instead of putting the email address in the "To" field, you put the number 500. Nothing more. That tells the system that you're trying to send it through the T-Mobile email gateway.

Then you put the email address you want to send to as the first item in the body of the text message. I tried it on the phone with the support rep, and it worked immediately.

I forgot about the 500 SMS address option... When I had my old Nokia 5190 back in 1999, I had to use the 500 address option. Nice to know that there's more than one way to send SMS to email.

[Blue4Life]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es70)

I've had to resort to this because the messaging clients of some of my PDA/smart phones didn't support sending an SMS to an email address directly. This includes some Windows Mobile, Palm, & Symbian OS devices.

This technique also works for other carriers as well. For example, 36245 is the gateway for Cingular/AT&T Mobility customers and 0000000000 is the gateway for former AT&T Wireless customers.