Carrier Charging Texting for iMessages

They are being classified as imessages on my phone. It is NOT the same as when imessage fails and it is sent as a green text message. I have those too, but that is NOT what I am talking about. I can see the difference between SMS messages and imessages, and these are showing up as being delivered through imessage.

The only explanation, then is that the iMessage send is failing, it is falling back to SMS and a bug in iMessage or on the iMessage servers is failing to notify the phone that the send did not work and that it reverted to SMS.

I'm getting the same prob as referenced here: blue texts are getting billed. Indeed, i have some that are going to my kids handmedown iPhones with iCloud accounts (and therefore, iMessage) but no phone number activated. They show up in ATT by email address.

No idea how ATT is figuring out how to charge extra for those data packets, but they are.

(My understanding is that if iMessage fails in its "just like data" mode, it will send the SMS (unless unchecked as described above) but that the message will then show up as green. But I'm not sure about that.)

Hi, I'm new to the board, but found this discussion right on point and very helpful. I am an AT&T customer and never took a Texting Plan. However, I have only started using that function in the past 6 months and only to four different friends. All on iphones. I noticed that my charges were climbing up recently and of course AT&T had no clue what I was talking about, i.e., no charge for iphone to iphone msg. Your post was very helpful. I changed the default settings on my phone and began logging each and every msg in and out by date. Have only done this for about a week now, but it seems to have worked. I have not lost any msgs and have received photos as well....no charges on this either. I checked my current setting against your post, and the only difference I have is on the Character Count. I have that set off. I should mention that one of my friends did not upgrade is OS...DUH..and

that is the only msg transactions I see charged on my bill. There is a section on the AT&T bill for current usage (not yet billed) and a link for 'VIEW DATA DETAILS'. That breaks down the sent/recd numbers by date. Hope this helps and thanks for the tips.

I would like to know why Apple has not acknowledged this is a problem or tried to fix this with the carriers but I don't appreciate getting charged for iMessages at all. When I iMessage an iPod or iPhone or an iPad I'm getting charged

Next Bill Cycle: 02/10/13

Data (MB): 854.45

Group Data (MB): 1,438.93 of 6,144

Messaging: 451 of Unlimited

Visit us online at www.att.com/DataPlans

I'm on AT&T's unlimited talking text with Shared data but I still done appreciated it showing on my bill every time I send an iMessage. It will literally send their email if IiMessage an iPod or iPad. On the text message it just is my part of the messaging also. 95% of my friends have iPhones iPods or even iPads and I don't understand why AT&T's able to distinguish the data and charge for it. When I had to Verizon and had an android I sent 2000+ text messages a month and know I need unlimited but with iMessage I would figure It would be a lot lower when I don't really text people without iPhones and I'm about at 500 messages after 9days. Also another thing I noticed it says messages in the text message I get from AT&T not text messages like it used to be a few years back.

Back in the day when everyone had BlackBerries and used BBM no one was ever charged for those as text messages but now I'm getting charged for iMessage with Apple?

Go to Settings/Messages and turn OFF "Send as SMS". The carrier has no way of knowing the contents of your data; if they are charging for messages that you think are going as iMessages then those messages failed to go as iMessage and were sent as SMS.

It is off and still showing up

As I said, the carrier has no way of knowing the contents of data, so if an imessage shows up in your list of messages then it was not an imessage.

I had a similar situation. I turned off "send as SMS"; still charged for msgs. However, once I turned off BOTH

'send as SMS' AND "MMS Messaging, I found no charges. I tracked those msgs for 2 weeks to verify (scroll down and find "SMS/MMS' turn off MMS Messaging. the only problem I found was you cannot send images to a NON APPLE PHONE. Images and videos will go thru to the recipients with iphones. Hope this helps.

I think this is happening to my wife & I. She sends iMessages to her mom in europe and our latest bill is showing $20+ in international text messages and MMSes. I haven't had a chance to look at her phone, but I've compared my "text message" history on Bell's website to that of my iphone and the ones that are showing as texts show up as "blue" on my phone so they were definitely sent as iMessage (at least I was lead to believe that). Maybe the phone failed back to TXT but never indicated that to me. I'm guessing the same thing is happening with my wife's phone.

What I think also complicates the matter is if your friend has iMessage set up on a computer/iPad and those devices receive the iMessage, your Messages app thinks the message was delivered as an iMessage even if it ends up failing over to SMS to the destination iPhone.

If you don't want it to fail over to SMS then turn off that feature in Settings/Messages.

Yes I know, but it should change the color of the message if it fails over, which doesn't seem to happen some of the time.