Text message explosion!!!

For any of you who tried to contact me over the weekend, please accept my apologies! Here is the story with the reason why you couldn't reach me...

On Saturday, just before a trip to the Container Store with my wife Mary, I installed Thunderbird on my home computer and attached it to our various email accounts. My hope was to keep better tabs on incoming messages without flipping from account to account. Everything worked perfectly and I had it up and running in a matter of minutes. With a smile on my face I headed out to car and we were preparing to be on our way when my text message alert went off on my phone. Glancing at my phone I saw my usuall "You have 1 new message" alert on the front display. Before I could even open the clamshell to see what it was, the numbers began to run upwards rapidly until finally "You have 30 new messages" and then "Inbox Full!"

I opened the first message and it was an email to me from Brad Kloth from over a year ago. The others were the same... year old email messages... to my phone... by text message. I knew immediately that Thunderbird had something to do with it but I couldn't think what exactly because I hadn't set any forwarding parameters within the program. Then it hit me... over a year ago I had set up my T-mobile online account to forward my gmail messages to me. This was back when I wanted to be kept up to date by the minute... Unfortunately I never got it to work. Over the last year I probably tried 3 separate times to get it to run properly but it never did. I then just gave up on it as a feature that was not compatable with my phone. Now, here I am many many months later and I am getting an alert for every email that I have received on my gmail account SINCE I OPENED IT! Oh yes, it wasn't just the last year or so of emails, oh no. That would be too simple... the T-moble service that was somehow awakened by Thunderbird could not tell the difference between gmail's "All mail" and gmail's "inbox" and so it was sending me everything I had ever recieved since early in 2005.

I jumped online and de-activated the account through t-mobile, cleared the messages from my phone and un-installed thunderbird until I could figure out how to stop this.

Every time I cleared the text messages more would pour in. I called t-mobile directly to find out what was happening and they told me that I was not going to be charged for them but that I was going to have to wait it out.

And so it began... Every couple of minutes my phone would flip out and ring like crazy, then alert me like crazy that my inbox was full and then go crazy again because I had messages waiting. Eventually I just turned the ringer to silent and checked the phone every 10 minutes or so to clear out the messages and allow the next 30 of them to come through. 30 at a time, they just kept coming... and coming... and I as missing calls from people... because all of the alerts would pile up on each other and wig out my phone...

Needless to say I have now received again every email that I have ever received by gmail through my cell phone. Fabulous feature this email alert from T-mobile. I'll have to write them a thank you for such commitment to their service. *ugh*

~Jim