SMS at 1cent in Mauritius

Featured BlogoStar Kyu from Kyusphere illustrating you the things you can do with the email feature on your mobile phone - a project we baptised MOBILEMAIL Be a guest author you too as BlogoStar on BlogoSquare. Contact me if you have anything interesting to share

I’ll guide you down here in setting up your phone so that it can send SMS/messages at only 1cent from an Emtel SIM. The principle behind is very basic. It uses the Email feature that some phone models have and allow you to send a message via Email through GPRS to the person you want. Since it’s through GPRS and not GSM(normal SMS uses this), the message is sent at only 1cent. Follow on for the configurations.

free sms

Check for these requirements first:

Make sure that your mobile meets the following criteria before proceeding :

  • GPRS for your mobile should be activated.
  • Your phone should have the Email function. Note that I’m not talking about SMS Email because that’s completely different. Check it out and you should see something from the menu called Email itself.
  • A POP3 mail account. Most of you must certainly have one, those having their email ending in intnet.mu already have a POP3 account. But if not you may consider giving yourself one from Yahoo! Just get to any subdomains of Yahoo! like Yahoo.co.uk or Yahoo.fr and their emails allow you to do POP3.

the approach

Since I own a Sony Erickson, this How-to will base itself on the options of a Sony Erickson. There are so many phone models and I know the options will differ from one to another but I’m sure if you grasp the concept behind you will be ready in giving it a try for any model you have.

Drum roll, the steps

Switch that phone of yours on, we’re starting.

  • From the main screen, go to Menu > Connect > Data comm > Data accounts > New account
  • Select GPRS data > and set these options as follows:
    • Name : mail
    • APN : WEB
    • User ID : put your mobile number here
    • Password: MMSC
    • finally do Save.

Now after setting the preliminary configuration, we must setup your phone to accept email, just follow on, we are on STEP 2 :

    Get to the front screen and do

  • Menu > Messages > E-mail > Options > Edit account > Add new
  • Now do you remember the mail account I’ve been talking above, we will be using that for the new mail account that we’re creating with the phone.
  • Do connect using > mail protocol and set the following options :
    • POP3 inc.server : place your POP3 incoming server address here which should be something like pop.something.com for example.
    • Incoming Port** : leave all these settings intact, no touch here unless your POP3 mail has other settings as the one by default.
    • Mailbox : include your username in here. If your mail is person@intnet.mu then put only person here. In fact that option is a misnomer that should be username instead since this is what it’s really.
    • Password : enter that password for your POP3 mail account here!
      Then we’ve got to poke some deeper settings, look on :
    • Outgoing server/port : you will obtain that information from the POP3 account you have.
    • E-mail adress : put your POP3 email address here, something like you@intnet.mu
    • Download : here you will specify whether you want to download the entire message(SMS) or just the headers(a small description probably) when receiving the new mail(SMS). I’ll explain this gibberish below, for now just follow on minutely, the explanation follows afterwards.
    • From name : this is your sender name, put something descriptive so that those receiving the mail/SMS may know who sent it.
    • Copy outgoing : do you want to send a copy of your messages to another POP3 mail then put that mail address you want here.
    • Check interval : specifies the lapse of time after which the phone connects and checks the mail automatically. Note that each connection costs 1 cent, pretty costly I think ;-)

Checking your emails on your mobile:

After configuring your phone as above it’s now also possible for you to check your email from that mobile itself. You’ve got nothing to do for that, in fact your POP3 mailbox will be checked during the delay we have set above so it’s automatic. You can also use the same technique to send a normal email to someone on a PC.

free sms

sending a 1 cent SMS/message

To send a message/SMS we won’t send it to the number for example 493 4585 instead we’ll send it using the mail service that EMTEL offers. With every number from EMTEL is associated an email address like number@emtelworld.net so 4934585@emtelworld.net in our example. So just compose a message through EMAIL and send it to the mail address of that number for which you want to send a message/SMS. It’s just simple plain basic.

More to come

This how-to is by no mean a complete and thorough one, some more explanation might be required, but as this new trick has been discovered, it’s still under the phase of further testing to bring it to the ultimate use so that one day we might stop calling it SMS but Mobilemail. Please leave by a comment to tell me what you think of this trick and if you have been successful in setting up your Mobilemail and don’t forget, poke everyone about that so that they can also start enjoying their 1cent SMS.

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