Ricky Says

I had to drop my car off at Les Schwab this morning and realized I forgot to bring my cell phone with me, so I couldn't call my wife to let her know how long I'd be.

Fortunately I had my laptop with me and was able to send her a text message using email.

To send SMS text messages to any cell phone in the US using email, just use your 10-digit phone number including area code as the first part of the email address (without any dashes or hyphens).

Use the table below to figure out the last half of the email address for each major phone carrier:

Type your text message as the email subject and don't worry about entering a message body, but remember there's a 140 character limit to text messages so keep it brief just like you would if you were using your cell phone.

Text messaging fees still apply when texting via email.

Question: I read your comments about putting a signature into a Blackberry, but to take this one step further, can I add my company logo to this signature?

Currently, we use the signature file in Outlook but this comes as an attachment through Blackberry emails.

Question: Someone sent me 2 ringtones in an email. How can I e-mail them to my phone? Is there anyway I can bluetooth them?

Question: I love Facebook and have connected with several old time friends that I haven't seen in ages. I find though that my inbox is filling up with emails from Facebook, letting me know every little thing all my friends are posting. Is there a way to turn off these emails?

Answer: (this question is waiting for an answer. If you know the answer, please feel free to use the comment form below and be sure to leave your name and a link to your website, so I can give you credit for your answer)

Question: I keep getting duplicate emails on my Blackberry Curve 8310, and it seems to be only messages that I reply to (where the original message will show up again after I reply to it, even if it was received several weeks ago). Is there a way to turn this off?

Answer: The trick for turning off duplicate emails was to switch the account type to use my company's outlook web mail address instead of integrating directly with the exchange server.

Basically I logged into the Blackberry email account setup screen and deleted my existing email account, and then created a new one that used the same web address that I use when I log into Outlook with the web client.

The devil is in the details however, and here are the tricks I used to create a blackberry email account that used my company's outlook web address instead of exchange.

First, I logged into the blackberry internet service page (http://att.blackberry.com for me since I'm with AT&T), and then deleted the account that I had set up.

Next, I created a new account using test@test.com (or some bogus email address that the service won't be able to find. This is necessary because it won't show you the super advanced account configuration options unless it can't connect to your mail server, so this fakes it out).