ios6 Defaulting to MMS messages

[Benjs]

Hi

Has anyone else noticed that when sending a new message to someone the phone defaults to sending an MMS instead of a SMS or iMessage?

This has resulted in a lovely conversation with o2 this morning who tried to advise me that if i send more than 480 characters in a text then it sends as a picture message, which is why i have been charged the extra outside of my contract!!

Most annoyed - is it a glitch with ios6 or the iPhone 5?

I've turned MMS off until i know whats causing it.

[perksie]

I think MI5 is right, we've seen this before here.

[darrengf]

Well I can tell you i knew when i sent the MMS it was to a number and I dont have the persons email address in my phone.

I agree i sent 1 MMS, however it was going as Imessaging then suddenly out of the blue was sent as MMS. (Had full 3g signal too) I was sending a pic of father Xmas, so i even know what it was lol

Also strange its never done it before, as my phone is told if it cant send over imessaging, then fail it. However it didnt. I acctually watched it suddenly switch from imessgae to MMS.

I checked it after as well, no email address at all in the message, just a mobile number and no other pics sent since.

Sorry I didnt quote the correct and full number

000000000001234

This is it.  just copied it straight from my account

[perksie]

We saw this before here:

http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Apple-iOS-Devices-iPhone-iPad/iPhone-sending-MMS-messages/td-p/115808

[Anonymous]

This happened to me a couple of months ago. It coincided with me sending a photo from my phone to my email address. It gave the same 00000000001234 code as above. O2 said this was the case and was charged accordingly. I also noticed group texts were sent as mms. Lesson learnt. Turned mms off and don't email photos. Use Dropbox instead.

[Benjs · Accepted solution]

Spoke to a lovely helpful woman at o2 today. She explained that it is a fault to do with the iPhone and they've had a "memo" about it. 

Basically its a fault and it will tell you at the top of the screen when typing a new message if its a "message", "iMessage", or "MMS" so need to keep an eye on it. 

When i disputed the charges as not my fault and didn't know she kindly on this one occasion reimbursed it but i got told to keep an eye on it in future. 

Lesson learnt, but think it needs flagging with Apple as its pretty dumb of the phone to default to sending MMS messages. 

[Liquid]

Good to know its a known issue and thanks for advising us:)

Ill have to keep an eye on it now:(

[Toby]

Thanks for updating us on the community Benjs

[adamtemp64]

Strange my iphone 4s ios 6.0.1 is not defaulting to mms and I have mms enabled? (but subject turned off)

So as a test I enabled the subject line then selected a non iphone contact then an iphone contact and see what I got I would say the subject line is causing the issue and not any other fault.

[Anonymous]

It might help if in the general, Facebook settings you disallow sharing contacts with Facebook as it then preselect email address and sends a text to it, which will result in mms charge.
I tested it with having Facebook share on but mms switch off and low & behold it refused to send message as mms was off. It's apple factory settings that are naff, but O2 won't openly accept it that they know about the problem and any refund is really at their discretion as its how well we can use and set our phone. I had mine 3 days and am thinking whether it is worth the hype as its not as user friendly as apple would like us to believe. Just out of curiosity is it happening to other types of phones? So far what I read mentions only iPhones

[Anonymous]

ive just received my bill which has over £23 added to it for MMS charges.  This was a result of sending a text message on NYE to multiple recipients.  o2 confirm that this is a resyult of the settings on the iphone 5 or more importantly on the ios6.  This defaults to MMS for multiple contacts.  o2 have refunded me half the money and have advised me not to send a text to multiple recipients if I dont want to be charged.

In essence this sounds like an Apple issue?