I want MMS without my iphone trying to access the internet at the same time, and charging me for it!

WiFi only for MMS would work if your phone was not under contract and you did not have a phone plan or data plan. But, as far as I know, with an iPhone, in order to get phone service, you need a phone plan with a data plan.

If you're with AT&T, I just changed my plan to the new Unlimited Text plan, which includes unlimited Mobile>Mobile calls. Any Mobile phone, not just At&T. That allowed me to drop down to the 450 nationwide plan, since most of my calls are to other mobile phones..

If you do not want to use your iPhone on a data plan contact your cell provider and have them block cell data to your iPhone, assuming they do not require a data plan in your country. Do be aware several features, including Visual Voice Mail, will no longer function when you do this.

SMS and MMS are cell voice protocols and will not work over WiFi or cell data.

On your iPhone's Settings -> General -> Network, just disable the 3G data and the Cellular Data, which should turn your smart phone just into a phone.

Message was edited by: probe_droid

Not MMS, but Google Mail SMS - Just another idea

I also just realized that the iPhone does this different since iOS 4, see here: iPhone: Troubleshooting MMS.

Therefore it seems to be impossible to just use MMS without a data connection.

I know that other (older) phones just send MMS via your cell provider's standard cell network protocol (e.g. GSM).

Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data : set this to "OFF". The effect will be that no cellular data traffic (e.g., Internet over cellular network) will take place. SMS and MMS will be unaffected (if you subscribe to MMS service; if you do not have MMS service, your carrier may implement delivery of MMS content by SMS providing a link to content on a web page).

Turning off the 3G service doesn't affect cellular data usage, it only affects the speed and the battery usage.

Note that turning off cellular data does disable visual voice-mail, which relies on the service.

In my iPhone with iOS4 it is still called cellular data, if yours is called "Mobile Data" that is probably because of the carrier settings. I tried mine turning off Cellular Data, it will not allow MMS to be sent. There is no work around for this apparently other than to have a data plan, it uses just a minor amount of cell data when it sends one. If you need MMS without using cellular data, sell your iPhone and take the profit and buy a simpler phone that isn't built around having a data plan.

Or as someone else pointed out try using Google MMS, if it is available to you.

MMS may not "work" in the sense that you cannot send MMS without cellular data, but you should be able to receive MMS messages as URLs (as opposed to the actual MMS message).

Keep in mind that MMS is not like SMS. MMS does depend on Internet access to send and receive the media content. When you send data by MMS, your handset encodes the media as a MIME message and posts it to an MMSC (special web service provided by your carrier). The carrier then determines the recipient and either forwards to another carrier, or forwards an SMS controll message with the URL at which to receive the media content. Depending on how your account is configured with your carrier, you will either receive an SMS message with a URL, or your phone will automatically receive the URL and try fetch the media content from the carrier's server and display it in your SMS/MMS application.

The key part is that MMS always requires cellular data (Internet) access to send MMS data, and optionally requires it to retrieve the message (if it's disabled, you *should* receive an SMS message with a URL where you can find your MMS content, but that's up to the carrier).

For MMS to work normally, cellular data is required. That's inherent in the protocol. Look up the Wikipedia entry on MMS for details.