Motorola, IM and T-Mobile USA

Boy, it took me a long time to find this information on the web… So how do you get these to work together? Not easily. Unless you have T-Mobile’s full internet offering, you only have the POP, IMAP and WAP ports open. You can access websites, but only if you can configure a proxy through a T-Mobile server. So basically, you’re out of luck for just about everything else unless you want to pay an extra $15 a month for ancient GPRS speeds.

The bigger problem is that T-Mobile doesn’t run a traditional IMPS server which is data-centric — they route it through SMS, so they can charge you for text messaging plans as part of IM support. Isn’t that thoughtful of them?

However, there is a way to use the Wireless Village client with T-Mobile through their proxy.

Here’s the settings you need. These do not change no matter what service you’re trying to connect to:

Account Settings —
IM ID: (see below)
Password: (see below)
IM Server: 216.155.165.050
IM Port: 8080
Post URL: (see below)
Secure login: No

ISP Settings —
GPRS APN: wap.voicestream.com
Username: (leave blank)
Password: (leave blank)

See, you’re using the proxy for the IM server and connecting via the WAP gateway. This covers the usual problems of being unable to use real ports to access real services.

As for the fields we skipped, these map up to the service you want to connect to. In the case of Yahoo! Messenger, this is what you enter:

IM ID: (your Yahoo! username)
Password: (your Yahoo! password)
Post URL: wirelessvillage.yahoo.t-mobile.com

Technically, this approach should work for all other supported services, but the exact Post URLs for them haven’t been discovered yet.

(Source: MotoModders)

P.S. If your phone’s IM client can directly set an SMS number for messaging, then check out this forum post of the correct T-Mobile USA IM relay settings.

[Edited 2006-04-28] If you want to use Yamigo, which is a free IMPS server that “aggregates” all the IM services together, adjust the following settings:

IM ID: (your yamigo.com username)
Password: (your yamigo.com password)
Post URL: www.yamigo.com/wv/control