Hack T-Mobile Prepaid Messaging and T-Zones

by Mr. Curious / DoPi

I am an unrepentant cheapskate and also an information junkie.

As you can probably imagine, these two aspects of my personality are constantly at war with one another - the latter always wanting more and fresher data, the former usually unwilling to foot the bill.  The compromises to which they usually come leave them both wanting, and are perhaps best personified by my mobile f0ne: a vanilla, no-frills "gimme" handheld with T-Mobile prepaid.  For the most part, it has functioned adequately for what I need: a short voice call or two per day and the occasional SMS.  Even the heavily-castrated (but, all importantly, free) "T-Zones" function has worked fairly well and provided data snippets like stock quotes and weather forecasts when I've needed them.

What the phone lacked in PDA function, I worked around using Google Calendar and the very cool GVENT (48368) SMS on-the-fly event creation function, which I could couple with home and work PCs without ever having to physically sync.  However, between the sending and receiving of several SMS reminders (as well as the occasional Twitter or regular SMS messages), I found myself burning through more nickels and dimes (literally) than my stinginess could handle.

Furthermore, there have been a few times that I've needed fairly "normal" web access-to win a bet, look up a definition, or what-have-you.  The free "T-Zones" web access provides direct links to only a few sites (news, sports, "amusing info," etc.), and any attempts to enter URLs pointing anywhere outside of this handful of pages would return the always-nasty message: "Your plan does not support this feature."

So T-Mobile keeps their prepaid customers on a pretty strict data diet, right?  No, not so much.  By utilizing the steps below, you can work outside the margins that T-Mobile has established for its prepaid customers.  The steps involved are not always time-effective, but they do provide some options to soup-up your prepaid plan at no cost.

First of all, you may notice that at the top of the T-Zones page, there is a search box.  Typing anything in there and clicking "Search" takes you to a Yahoo! Mobile oneSearch results page.

So, now we know that Yahoo! Mobile, though not referenced anywhere in the T-Zones menus, is not part of T-Mobile's DNS blacklist (probably because many of the handsets include a podunk Yahoo IM client).

So then you'll see that if you point the WAP browser to the URL us.m.yahoo.com, you get a fairly full page of options.  Bookmark this page.  Now, you can see that one of the options there is Yahoo! Mail - and bear in mind that we are still in the free area of T-Zones.  So go ahead and send and receive messages with wild abandon... T-Mobile's prepaid per-message charges do not apply here.  At this point I went ahead and stopped my SMS Twitter alerts and pointed them instead to my Yahoo! inbox - ditto with SMS event reminders from my Google Calendar account (which I retained because it is superior in all respects to Yahoo!'s).

And now that I have access to a regular mobile inbox, by extension I also have access to essentially the full Internet.  I can do this by use of web-by-email services such as www@web2mail.com (enter target URL in subject) or www4mail@wm.ictp.triese.it (enter target URL in body), which will pull the current page and send it to your Yahoo! Mobile inbox.

There are some even faster work-arounds that can be manipulated by use of the oneSearch function.  If you enter "wiki" and your search term in the search box, a mirrored Wikipedia entry for your search term (retrieved from a still-accessible Yahoo! domain) can be received.

Some other sites that do not appear on the T-Zones menus but are accessible by URL entry include: mobi.traffic.com, radar.net, 4INFO (wap.4info.net), and even Amazon (www.amazon.com/gp/aw).

Again, none of these methods or WAP sites are particularly suave, but they get the job done and don't cost a penny.  Even if I ever put my tightwad days behind me and (gasp!) get on a contract plan, I'll always retain my trusty T-Mobile prepaid (with a couple bucks balance to keep it alive), which, in a pinch, will be able to provide me free web access for life.

Shout-outs: Bobakko & Benji, DoPi, JaR_G0ats, Syn Ack (757), HoFo.