I’ve come up against an interesting problem: O2’s email servers are stripping out attached 3GP videos, transcoding them to a lower quality (but higher file size) AVI, attaching the AVI and sending the email on to the recipient with a link back to O2’s website in certain situations:

You have received a Media Message
This Media Message has been sent using an O2 camera phone.

Click here to view this message online[…]

I spent an incredible amount of time on hold to customer support playing chinese whispers with a very helpful lady who knew nothing about my problem, but had to relay everything while I was on hold as the technical support department wouldn’t originally speak directly to me.

So, here’s what I was told, in order, by the helpful lady (relaying from Tech Support):

O2’s email servers have a 300Kb limit
Funny - the .3gp is 102Kb, but the attached transcoded AVI is 200Kb

You phone is doing the conversion before it’s sent
Then why do O2 have a copy of the original, full-resolution .3gp on their server? If my phone’s doing the conversion, then the converted file would be sent.

You didn’t have WAP settings turned on on your account.
So how come I’ve been using the WAP service for the past couple of months whilst I test Pitch?

And what does having WAP settings turned on on my account have to do with sending an email?

What I’ve also discovered:
Even though I run my own IMAP server, and can receive email quite happily, I am not allowed to use my IMAP server to send email - all outgoing email has to go through O2’s outgoing SMTP server - which means any outgoing email is not being sent from my server, and the headers reflect this - not an ideal situation.

There’s also no way I can find out why this is happening, as technical support didn’t seem to know why I couldn’t make a port 25 connection to my mail server. Given that I can quite happily connect to port 25 on O2’s mail server, this tells me that the connection is being blocked, which is a real pain.

Conclusion:
It appears some newer phones are hiding the fact that you are sending something as a media message, making it appear as if you are sending an email instead.

So if you want to send someone a mobile video by email, make sure you’re actually sending it via email and not as a media message.