This blog entry cost me $113.70

So, I’m loving my t-mobile cell phone account (I get unlimited HotSpot access at Starbucks and lots of other places, too). However, I just learned that one service I don’t have is free text messaging. Normally, that’s not a problem because I’m a middle-aged white guy and “texting” is for young kids cheating on tests and looking for sex partners (at least, that’s what I get from the news : ).

Anyway, I just got my t-mobile bill and my phone has been receiving text messages to the tune of 54/day for a total of 1137 in the first 21 days. At $0.10/message, that doubled my bill and confused the hell out of me, because I only ever see a text message on my phone when I miss a call from my wife or when my European friends text me, i.e. about 10/month. Where have all of these text messages come from?

Apparently, they come from Exchange using AUTD (Always Up To Date) to notify my phone that new messages are available. I didn’t know that’s how this worked; I was just happy to get it to work at all. Luckily, this is no longer a problem. AUTD was apparently a Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition thing that my old Audiovox 5600 used (I must have had free text messaging on my AT&T Wireless account and not noticed how young and hip my phone was).

Luckily, my text message traffic has fallen back to near zero because of my Qtek 8500, which uses “push email.” Apparently push email keeps an HTTP session open to Exchange using my unlimited data access instead of using my (very!) limited text message access.

I sure wish there’d been some way of knowing this before the first bill arrived, of course, but it’s nice to know my Qtek is actually saving me money (at least, that’s what I’ll tell the wife : ).