Why do my iPhone text messages mess up on other's phones?

Uncle Google is thwarting me on this one ...

If I send a short SMS text message to multiple recipients from my iPhone, the people at the other end, if they don't have an iPhone themselves, will receive some kind of weird multimedia download message. On one phone I saw, the message had an animated border around it, for example. On another, the recipient was warned of a 2k download, got a total of three messages, and finally received my text in the third message.

What gives here? This doesn't happen with a single-recipient message.

Never heard of that happening on my wife's iPhone and I know she does it and only one of her friends has a iPhone. You've got something very weird going on.

It sounds like you're sending out a MMS for some reason. The iPhone is capable of sending out multiple recipient SMS as it just sends out each one individually.

You got it set to some odd character set or region? Enabled Emoji?

Sounds like your issue here Tony:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1223400

That info was current for 3.0 of the OS, but if it was indeed a "feature" maybe it's still the same issue. Sending multi SMS defaulting to MMS so it only costs you the price of one message instead of multiple.

The solution in that thread (at least up to the point I read) was to turn off MMS before sending.

Yes, that's a good description of what is happening: when I send a multi-recipient SMS, it becomes an MMS for some reason.

I'm not using anything special in terms of configuration or character set. And I don't know what settings, if any, would govern this.

Ah, so that's the issue. The only way to keep group messages from being MMS's is to disable MMS messages entirely. Meaning I won't be able to send pictures unless I retwiddle the setting each time.

Gr.

Thats a bit stupid though. Not every can view MMS as you've noticed and it also eats into their data plan slightly. There is no toggle at all for this? Weird.

Surely there must be an app for this!

There's probably a plugin for SBSettings to toggle MMS - SBS requires Jailbreaking though.