External e-mail on your T-Mobile? Think again.

[Steve]

Buying an e-mail capable phone from T-Mobile doesn't mean you'll be able to access your external e-mail account, thanks to a 'walled garden' setup by T-Mobile. What's worse, you might find yourself on a wild goose chase trying to resolve the 'issue'. The Register reports:

T-Mobile will only allow external email to be accessed through its MDA line of Windows-based PDAs, or its Blackberry devices, which involve an additional fee to Blackberry's owners RIM.

T-Mobile customers who choose many of the other email-capable phones on the market are not told by the company they will not be able to access email, however. Instead, they are repeatedly advised to contact either the phone manufacturer or their ISP to recover settings that will enable them to gain access to their email.

When those companies advise customers that it is an issue with T-Mobile and not themselves, they return to T-Mobile customer services - only to receive the same advice from the service provider.

In a recorded conversation we held with one T-Mobile representative, we were told five times that it was an issue with the phone manufacturer, or our ISP.

Get the customers won over by the features of the phone, then pass them around various departments long enough for them to be unable to return it and cancel their contract, once they find out they can't use all the features they're paying for.

[mike_dowler]

I have a Sony Ericsson K700i on T-mobile - certainly not a smartphone! I can access my external email fine - I just put in the address for my pop server, username and password, and it works a treat. I haven't tried sending from the phone though - I usually just download the message headers to see if there is anything important that can't wait til I get home. Which there isn't.

[menthel]

You can recieve, but not send. I found that out with my p910i. Also when I broke the screen on the day I was on call, so had no phone, they just blanked me for any help whatsoever. I got it fixed in the end at my local phone repair/sales shop on Wimbledon Broadway. Much less helpful than orange, a big shame that I get no orange signal where i live.

[Zathras]

Sorry, the guy on The Register demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the most basic of email principles and writes a completely sensationalized and just wrong article including lots of fancy phrases like 'walled-garden'. True, the CS guy wasn't very clear in return, but people can expect that. T-mobile offer a blackberry Instant Email plan that is only available on the MDA series and Blackberrys, but inbuilt email clients can work fine on a normal plan using GPRS or WAP. This process is not 'supported' by T-mobile as in you can't ring up and expect T-mobile to talk you through the setup, but if you get the settings from your ISP and work out how to use the email client by talking to your phone's manufacturer you can get it to work. So in that sense the CS guy was right.

As for not being able to send email, it's the same situation as with many different ISPs where they fobid you from using SMTP servers other than their own to send out email to help cut down on spam. If you use the t-email smtp server and your username/password you can send email.