I've had T-Mobile service for a few weeks, and I've noticed that their email -> SMS gateway (via phonenumber@tmomail.net) automatically converts some larger text messages to MMS.

This is mostly an issue with some IT/status-monitoring tools, where some of our systems send short messages via email -> SMS gateways, for staff to receive alerts as SMS messages on their phones.

I've come across a handful of threads on a couple of T-Mobile forums, with people being less than happy about this automatic MMS conversion for some messages that could just as well be delivered as SMS, and obviously there are issues with phones that don't have native MMS support.

I have checked out the fMMS app, and I applaud the fMMS developer for filling that feature gap on the n900, but I'm curious if anyone has noticed the SMS/MMS conversion issue w/T-Mobile, and has come up with any useful workarounds to avoid the unwanted SMS -> MMS conversion.

I didn't have this automatic SMS -> MMS conversion issue when I was using an AT&T SIM in the n900, so it seems to just be a T-Mobile email -> SMS gateway issue.

I think if the character goes over 160 it converts it to MMS and when its an email, it is even more less character because of from: and to: field in there that is left.

Funny thing is... I'd get these notifications as SMS without fail on the n900, while using AT&T.

Now that I'm on T-Mobile, the same notifications consistently arrive as MMS.

I was aware of the 160 character SMS limit, and I'm going to see if I can trim some of the headers and other fat out of the original emails before they hit T-Mobile's email -> SMS gateway.

Does T-mobile allow you to forward copies to another e-mail addy. I do that with my company line on another network. I set up a Gmail account for this purpose. It isn't push but the N900 checks the Gmail account every 5 minutes which is enough for me.

As a bonus, you can set up a search engine for your Gmail account with Touch Search and search an archive of these messages anytime from the desktop on the N900.

I fixed this by trimming the original notifications a bit, and the email -> SMS gateway is no longer converting these to MMS.

AT&T was breaking some of these into multiple SMS messages, instead of converting them to MMS, but I can appreciate that a carrier can opt for either approach on messages near the (single SMS) 160 character limit.