no, really

For the longest time, I didn’t jump on the Cingular bandwagon. I had an old AT&T plan that was amazing, so I kept it all through the Cingular acquisition, and even up to the “new” AT&T. One of the great features of the plan was free incoming text messages.

I really exploited this feature. I set up my gmail to forward my txts to my phone, my gCal notifications… everything, via my

@mmode.com email address. Occasionally it was a pain, like when automated systems sent me a slew of messages at once and it wouldn’t stop beeping at me! But overall, it was like a free blackberry.I since had to change my plan (and made it better for less money… lord knows how), and now I pay for incoming txts. But when you’ve got 1500 a month, you don’t tend to run out.

All the sudden, this week… they stopped. Just….. stopped. And it bugged me a little. I was afraid my txts were broken, or I went over some mysterious limit. I googled a little for an answer, to no avail. I tested out sending from different accounts – no answer. I decided to do some network sleuthing on the @mmode.com address. As it turned out, the domain stopped working altogether! It was still owned by Cingular, but nothing was responding to it.

So I started to dig a little more into att’s text messaging to see if there was an answer. Nothing in the forums. Then I found this page that gave a summary of text messaging, and lo and behold! Waaaay at the bottom: “Send and receive emails using your phone’s email address. Your address is your 10-digit number@txt.att.net.” Brilliant!

I tested, and it works. I set up my gmail to do its thing, and presto! Order is restored. Now att… why couldn’t you do something nice like send everyone a text saying “we’re shutting the @mmode.com address off. please switch to @txt.att.net”? I guess they offer it, but it probably isn’t something they like to advertise. After all… for every email that is sent to a phone’s txt messaging, that’s one fewer text someone had to send.