Peter's Blog

Woo hoo. I've examined the online itemised vodafone bill and it appears that my google sms experiment was a success: the sms I sent came out of my 250 texts/month tariff and I was not charged any premium for it.

It would be nice for me to be able to receive email notifications about server outages etc using text messages on my K750i. In theory I could do this through my Vodafone email account which can send text messages to report new emails but in practise the vodafone email service is flakier than my servers:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    <censored>@vodafone.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553 5.3.0 Sorry, but your email could not be delivered
to the intended recipient. Please check the following link for details:
http://www.vodafone.net/error.htm

The error page this refers me to lets me check if an IP address is in a blocking list. If gmail is in a blocking list then it wasn't yesterday and overnight the spammers have won and made email useless.

The 'settings' page in vodafone's web email is offline again.

Conclusion: nice phone, lousy network.

Update: Also it appears that vodafone email notification texts do not come out of the 250 texts/month tarriff allocation: I have to pay 10.2p (+vat?) for them. Forget it. There are other email->sms gateways (e.g), possibly more reliable since their business depends on them.

Also, if an email is sent from the phone via SMS, the message received is buried in an html table full of vodafone graphics. It seems to be almost totally ruined for moblogging.

Vodafone web site has to be amongst the least reliable I have come across. I am supposed to be able to see itemised phone bills, adjust my settings etc but most of the time all I get is:

We are unable to display the billing information for the account you’ve chosen. This may be because it is a new account or because a temporary problem has prevented us from displaying the information. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

I want to check my phone bill but this has only worked properly on about one day in the last week. I have not seen all the features of the site working, there is always an error of this kind somewhere or the other.

I am not sure if it is still the case but Vodafone used to be the largest company in the uk by market capitalisation (price of shares times number of shares). A big company ought to be able to get some decent web development staff in.