Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, November 14, 2003

Posted 8:36 AM by Anurag

Mobile phone and Yahoo Messenger: A sypmhony

Recently I got a mobile. This is my second attempt at getting mobile. The first one was 2 years back and was a futile one where I ended up wasting money on a phone which only worked in the US (GSM 900). This time its a bliss!

Since much before I got a mobile for myself, I have been in touch by SMS with a lot of my friends who have mobile. Well, you see yahoo messenger allows you to send mobile messages (=SMS) for free without the recipient mobile user having anything to do with yahoo! After I got my mobile, I tried it with myself.I could send 4-5 SMS' successsfully to my mobile phone number from my yahoo messenger. After that I got a message saying:

"To continue receiving text messages from anuragkjain, you must reply to one of their messages. Your reply will be sent to anuragkjain".

I could continue recieving messages from yahoo messenger users but in order to do that I have to respond to that one message. This step is to protect mobile phone users from spamming. I somehow didn't reply to that message, and instead erased it! Then, whenever me or my friend tried sending SMS from yahoo messenger to my mobile number, s/he would get this yahoo messenger error:

"This number has chosen not to receive any text messages."

This continued for some time and then I hit google where I could find only one page discussing this problem! (there was one more, but in some non-english language).

I tried the solution outlined at the discussion forum. I sent messages to +8242105, +8242103, 8242101 but all failed and of course, I got charged for international SMS for these numbers :) I tried variants like 8242105, 8242103, 8242101 (without a + sign), but the nothing happened and nothing continued to happen (remember HHGTG?).

Then I went to Yahoo India and tried something. And I could fix it. Solution was very easy: You have to send an SMS which says 'unblock all' to the number 8242 (for India. dunno abt other countries) and voila! You'd recieve a reply SMS saying "All Yahoo! IDs unblocked successfully. You will now be able to recieve messages from any yahoo user".

Even though I started recieving yahoo SMS on my mobile from other yahoo users, but still I was unable to send SMS from my yahoo login to my mobile. I was getting this error: "Your friend must respond to one of your messages before you can send more." I again tried a command "reset anuragkjain" by sending it as SMS to 8242 from my mobile and zap!, it worked!

Simple, isn't it? When u know, of course. I wasted 30-35 rupees and numerous SMS before finding the right solution!

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