There are several ways to do email on your cell phone. Unfortunately, none of them seem to work.

In this post I want to describe my experiences with MMS.

If you have MMS set up on your phone you should be able to send an email to any address in the world. It works. Sorta. I succeeded in sending an MMS from my Vodacom and mCel phones to my Yahoo account. The Vodacom message arrived almost immediately. The mCel message took close to half an hour to arrive in my inbox. I replied to both messages with a short text message and sent them off. Nothing ever happened. It’s possible that the messages are stuck in some queue somewhere.

But think about this with me. You send a message. The person receives it and replies. Then you never get their response. How useful is that? Not very. Especially if neither of you are aware of the problem.

The Vodacom and mCel systems create email addresses for you based on your phone number:

Vodacom:  +25884[your number]@mms.vm.co.mz

mCel: 25882[your number]@mms.mcel.co.mz

This should work just fine but there seems to be a kink in the system.

Update 1: I spoke with mCel customer service and they asked me to send an email to my phone’s email address. I tried from another email account with the same results.

Update 2: I spoke with Vodacom customer service and was told that you can send MMS to email but not the other way around. They have a service called “vodamail” but it is only available for Vodacom users with a contract.

Here’s the information about MMS to email (in Portuguese): mCel and Vodacom.

It doesn’t say anything about receiving messages from the outside.