topic Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess) in Mobile Services

Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

Jen232 — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 13:28:52 GMT

Hi, naive question maybe.

I am being charged for picture messages. Is that if someone sends me a picture, vice versa.. or go over a limited amount of words in a text, which turns into an mms? Any advice welcome.

Jen

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

Chris_B — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 13:36:56 GMT

@Jen232 A text message is 160 letters including blank spaces, your not charged to receive a MMS. Sending an emoji can result in that message being sent as a MMS. Sending to a group message can result in the message going as a MMS. I think that’s 4 or more recipients

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

XRaySpeX — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 13:49:23 GMT

You are not charged for received MMS; only sent 1s. This could be cuz texts you have sent have been converted by your phone into MMS cuz it contained an emotion/emoji or it was sent to a group of recipients. Your phone should warn you it is doing this conversion.

See further in Text Messages Converting to Photo Messages? With regard to the condition "your text exceeds the 160 character limit" I find with my Samsung will send texts up to about 320 chars as 2 texts for the price of 2 & doesn't start converting to MMS until they are longer than that.

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

bristolian — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:01:20 GMT

Some phones can handle different emojis better than others, Android phones can be configured in a way that the vast majority of emojis can be sent over SMS rather than MMS - I'm unsure about Apple.

In any case, when you put characters in a text message that can't be sent via SMS, your phone will give an onscreen warning accordingly. It's a phone function not a network one.

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

XRaySpeX — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:23:03 GMT

@bristolian wrote:

Android phones can be configured in a way that the vast majority of emojis can be sent over SMS rather than MMS

Where?

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

Jen232 — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:28:33 GMT

Perfect thank you for your help 🙂

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

Jen232 — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:29:19 GMT

Thank you.. great help 👍

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

Jen232 — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:29:43 GMT

Thank you 😃

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

bristolian — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:10:54 GMT

I had to trawl the options on my Android phone to recall where the "anti-MMS" setting was, else I'd have included it on my earlier reply.

Under the text input settings, make sure input mode is set to either automatic or unicode. Animated GIFs will trigger MMS conversion, but I've never had a text converted to MMS in all the years I've used the inbuilt emoji library.

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

XRaySpeX — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:29:41 GMT

Thanks. The only setting I found before was under Multimedia Msgs > Set Restrictions as Restricted, Warning or Free. Now you pointed me at Unicode I shall try that.

You've never tried to send a long text?

Re: Being charged for picture messages (via text I guess)

bristolian — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:46:58 GMT

@XRaySpeX wrote:

You've never tried to send a long text?

Never mind trying - I frequently do. You've gotta do some serious typing before the "converting to multimedia" on-screen popup appears.

At that point you truncate back to a convenient part after "converting to text message" appears, then send and finish the message as another long SMS.