How to Email a Picture or Recording -- Solved
I’m not going through life with my nose buried in a little box in my hand. But it’s nice to be able to make a phone call whenever I want. Like the old-fashioned pay phone booth hiding in my pocket. And it costs a fraction of the monthly fees the little-box addicts are paying -- just $10 a month on AT&T’s auto-renew GoPhone, or $10 for three months on T-Mobile’s plan (but you have to renew on time!).
Still, I want to be able to send a photo or a recording to my email address, so whatever I see or hear (or speak), when I’m out, can show up in my computer. Reading a big list out loud. Photo of an accident. A strange view. All that stuff where you “wish I had a camera (or recorder) with me.”
But phone plan B does not work with a phone unlocked from phone plan A. My ATT phone, a Samsung A177, came unlocked but with various ATT codes still packed inside. So while it would make and receive phone calls on my cheap T-Mobile plan, even receive pictures or recordings attached to text messages, it refused to send these multimedia messages to an email address. Even though my T-Mobile plan specifically allowed them. What to do?
Like you, I crawled the net for weeks, reading all the messages on this site and a hundred others. No joy. Here, then, is how I finally broke through.
First, I went to the T-Mobile customer chat line. (Took me weeks even to find a doorway to it.) The lady actually wrote English as a first language, but when she heard I got the Samsung on eBay, she flowed in the bla-bla where it says if you didn’t buy your phone from us, we’re not going to help you one bit, and so on. I got mad, but I didn’t ball her out. She’s just a working stiff in a two-acre cubicle farm. “I hope you can help somebody else,” I typed curtly before clicking out of her system, not saying thank you.
Then the fun began. My phone vibrated (I hate ringing cellphones), and a text message came with the title “Configuration Message.” Just in case I missed the first one, she sent it three more times over a 24-hour period. What a sweetheart!
You may not find such a nice lady in your chat visit, but just say, “Please send me the T-Mobile (or whoever your provider is) Profile Message.”
When I clicked on the T-Mobile message, and on Options, my AT&T-limited Samsung offered me four choices. The first one was “Install.” I clicked it and the phone seemed to be thinking for a few seconds. Then it smiled at me.
I tried right away to send my email a picture message, but with only one network bar, in my house. The phone said nothing. No email came through. Later, I tried it in the back yard with three bars showing, and the phone boasted, “Message Sent.” Back inside, I found an email and there, lo, was the picture. Mission accomplished.
Maybe I just did what they call “unlocking” a phone. Whatever.
In the profiles section of my phone are now two profiles, the first one being AT&T. I found the second one labeled Profile 2, highlighted as if it’s turned on, and I relabeled it as T-Mobile.
If you can’t get a cubicle person to send you those words of your phone service profile, you can almost certainly google it. Then the trick is to crawl into your phone’s settings and type in the information. Here’s what I found in mine, which will be similar to what you find in yours. I left the settings alone, of course, since I had already scored.
I clicked Menu --- Messaging --- Messaging Settings --- Multimedia Messages --- Multimedia Message Profile --- and then down-arrows through this list: Profile Name, type in “desperate try” -- MMS Settings -- Bearer -- GPRS (under here, type a Proxy Address of 216.155.165.50, a Proxy Port of 8080, and leave the LoginID and Password blank) -- Proxy (click Enable) -- Server URL: (type in http://mms.msg.eng.t-mobile.com/mms/wapenc -- APN: (type in epc.tmobile.com). Yes, the two T-Mobile’s are spelled differently.
Now, all this stuff is probably on the web, but it’s cruel of the gurus to scatter it around like throwing coins on a lawn. Here it all is in one place. Enjoy.