I've heard lots of people over the years complain about Sprint, Verizon, ATT/Cingular/MCI. Some I have agreed with and witnessed personally, some I have not. I recently stumbled upon the worst I have seen so far.

Quick background story, I was helping a friend who lives in Canada setup a "moblog", such that he can MMS pictures from his cellphone to an email address, and via some procmail and scripting the picture could be extracted and automatically uploaded to Gallery or the app of his choice (Yes I know you can do this with Flickr, Facebook, and other apps, but he prefers to control his own data and that's not what this post is about).  Anyhow, I get it setup for him but for some reason it's not working properly, and my logs show there are way more MIME objects than there should be, so I get him to take a picture with his phone, and send it to my Google mail address with the subject "testing".

Attached is a link to a screenshot of what I received. I couldn't believe it.  For anyone who doesn't want to click the link, here is a summary:

* No matter what subject he sets for his message, it gets overriden with "You have received a Picture Message from your Rogers Wireless friend..."
* Besides the picture that he meant to send, included in the message were a DOZEN OTHER ATTACHMENTS!
* ...including advertisements in picture format, and other needless crap like their logo banner, verisign logos, etc.

So basically the MMS "feature" of his cell service is useless, as they force in a bunch of spam images and override your subject and body text with their own. We tested and it does this even if sending mobile-to-mobile MMS. What are they thinking?

Simply Amazing.

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/rogersucks.png