Beware of additional cost on mobile messaging

Angry_Customer_2013

After checking my mobile phone bill I found I had additional costs for media messages. I knew I had not sent all these picture messages so rang up my provider. I was absolutely speechless to find out:-
1. By adding an emojii (smilies ) at the end of my text automatically converted it to a media message which I would be charged for. (My tariff gives me unlimited text messages but charges £0.29 for multimedia)
2. By adding an emojii to an email also converts to multimedia message - again being charged
3 If i send a group text this also converts to multimedia and again charged.

I was told they were aware of this issue with all smart phones. They were also advised that no refunds or credit can be made to a persons account.

My reply was - As you are a communication company, and having all customers info on what phone they have would it not be an idea to send them all a text message asap (not rocket science) advising of these additional charges. They said there was nothing they could do at this point but are looking into it.
Yes Whatever ! !

As we are all encouraged that smart phones are the way forward this is one issue that should be highlighted when taking out your contract and not in the small print (if and when it appears).
:mad:

smartphone

Forgive my ignorance here but Emoji is a separate app that adds emoticons on to messages right? Reason I ask is that if you put a self created smiley on, such as : and ) for a smile, it's just standard text still, and these go through as normal SMS.

Tony5101

I just love it when people take the time to join sites like these to have a rant about their own ignorance.
If they took as much time to RTFM...then maybe..just maybe...they wouldn't feel it necessary to 'inform' the rest of us of their woes.

grumbler

Tony5101 wrote: »

I just love it when people take the time to join sites like these to have a rant about their own ignorance.
If they took as much time to RTFM...then maybe..just maybe...they wouldn't feel it necessary to 'inform' the rest of us of their woes.

I don't know what the manual says about smilies, but in my phone (android) basic smilies don't convert a text message to a MMS.

Rusty!

An email will NEVER be converted to an MMS.

Group texts can be changed to MMS, as this allows the resulting conversation to stay grouped. My phone has the option to disable that feature.

Adding smilies etc to a message will not convert it to an MMS, as they are text. The phone simply chooses to render it as an icon, even though it sends and receives nothing more than ":-)"

If you are adding a custom smile of some sort, then it will be a picture and it will be converted to an MMS.

MillicentBystander

All the people I either send MMS to or recive MMS from have whatsapp installed so no problems with charges at all. What the networks charge for sending an MMS is imo extortionate.

cd02

I had this happen to me with Three when I upgraded to an iPhone 4S. It might be worth asking them to look into it further as I sent a simple message to about 30 people containing just text and a smily face (as in : ) ) but for some reason I got charged for sending MMS'.

After looking into it they finally refunded the charges as I was able to prove that the message could still be sent even with MMS turned off. They never did come back to explaining why I was charged in the first place but I've not had the problem since and send smilies on a daily basis and quite often send group messages.