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How to avoid charges for Long Text Messages?

Icksieray
2: Seeker
2: Seeker
I have a Nokia 1520 and keep getting charged for sending the odd text message because, as I have been told by Vodafone, when a text message is over 160 characters, my phone automatically converts it to a Photo Message, which are not inclusive under the terms of my contract. Vodafone have also told me they do not charge for text messages above this conversion limit but to stop them from converting to Photo Messages and thus incurring a charge I have to change settings on my phone. Strangely, Vodafone say they cannot tell me how to do this and have suggested I post a request for instruction via this forum, so here I am, asking for help with this problem. - Please!
33 REPLIES 33

Cliveorr
2: Seeker
2: Seeker
I do regularly send long texts (jokes) to a group of fourteen people & have only been charged for long texts or mms message a few times which I'm sure wasn't when I sent the group texts.
At the end of the day, if its wrong, it will be whoever benefits from the extra money who is at fault.

Icksieray
2: Seeker
2: Seeker
Well after day's of trying to sort this out it seems to have come to a positive conclusion, I think the thing to watch out for is, if you leave group text or any MMS related settings switched on in message settings, then long texts will be converted to Picture Message's and will be charged as such! - Thank you to all the people that has help and tried to help with this matter!

jayiwa
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

I have also recently been charged for long sms too. It seems to be because my phone (Galaxy S6+, firmware 7.0) automatically converts long sms into 1 MMS, whereas back in the days my more-basic phones would just split the long message into multiple SMS (at 160 texts cut-off).

 And because my price plan has inclusive unlimited texts, I was suprised and somewhat angry at Vodafone's billing system. And I wasn't aware there's such silly functionality of converting a long SMS into an MMS.

 After diving into the native phone settings, I couldn't find anywhere to swtich off the automatic conversion of MMS. However, I downloaded Vodafone's app, "Message+", and there's a tickbox to remove this silly conversion. So, hopefully from now on my long SMS will just be split into multiple SMS's and will remain inclusive within my price plan.

 At first I was inevitably angry at Vodafone. But now I'm afraid I should point the finger at either Samsung or Android.

hrym
17: Community Champion
17: Community Champion

AFAIK, that's a Samsung thing, and I thought there was an option in the message app settings to split rather than convert (I'm pretty sure there was on my S2).   It's a long time since this has arisen and, tbh, I thought Samsung had fixed it (by defaulting to split).   It's not a Vodafone issue as they can only carry what was put into the system.