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Help mobile data question

I believe if you're referring to an SMS with a picture attachment that it does not count toward your data - if it did, I assume that just receiving the message would already have used the data whether you open it or not.

Just syncing email - so you see that you have new mail - uses data. Depending on the email app, it can end up using quite a bit - I had an issue with the email app on my old Desire using heaps of data and wound up having to drastically reduce the frequency that it sync'd and how much of each mail it read.

Even after sync'ing, opening an email can use more data as most apps will only download the headers - or say the first 30K of a message, enough for the preview - until you open the mail. Once you do that, the rest of the email body is downloaded, though usually not any attachments until you specifically request them.

Obviously, the body of an email doesn't tend to be that big.
 
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That makes it a little more clear, because my friend texted me a picture and it had the download button to press. (Mind You: Mobile Data is turned off). So I hit download and it would just say "Downloading" so i wait and waited. Soon as I hit mobile data on, the picture went through.

What I dont understand is why does my data have to be turned on to open a picture message?

Thanks,
Steve
 
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That makes it a little more clear, because my friend texted me a picture and it had the download button to press. (Mind You: Mobile Data is turned off). So I hit download and it would just say "Downloading" so i wait and waited. Soon as I hit mobile data on, the picture went through.

What I dont understand is why does my data have to be turned on to open a picture message?

Thanks,
Steve
Your data didn't have to be on to open it; your data needed to be on to receive (download) it.
As your said, you hit download, waited and waited.
It's like trying to connect to the internet with no connection- same principle on the phone.

I don't have mine in front of me right now but if you go into settings, data usage- you can set your data limit since you no longer have unlimited.
 
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MMS uses mobile data but it won't count against your data plan limit. But if someone text your a link to a picture and you click it, then it will count against your data plan limit.

And yes email will use data. Most email clients will default to only download a small limit of kB per email, and it won't download the attachment unless you click it. I have unlimited data so I set mine to download everything. ;)
 
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I just got confused, I thought the mobile data usage only referred to using the browser and emails.

You will be surprised how many things uses data. All the accounts sync uses data. Some will let you set it for WiFi only but not all. At one point, I noticed that a weather app I downloaded uses tons of mobile data. Turns out it was downloading wallpapers for the app to display the local pictures of the places I added. You just need to keep an eye out whenever you download a new app.
 
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