Note: This is a guest tech post by Mike Ducroiset (@MikeDuke1969).  Mike lives in Long Island New York and is a newly admitted patent attorney.  He worked for 17 years in the computer industry, has an undergraduate degree in Photonics and a love for technology.

I recently switched from Android to Windows phone.  Looking for quality but not wanting to spend a lot I chose the Nokia Lumia 520 Windows Phone.   I purchased it for $99 and I chose StraightTalk’s  $45/month unlimited prepaid plan.  Everything worked great until I started receiving text messages with attachments.  Since I probably spent more time going down the wrong path and because of the massive sales of this great quality, low cost phone I wanted to post this information because I figured others would be adding this phone to the StraightTalk network.

The Problem

The text portion of the message would appear but the attachments would not.  In their place of the attachment was the message: “Get media content now” with the file size in parenthesis as shown below:

2013-10-30_20-22-34_609 (2)

When I clicked the link, it would change to “Getting media content now” but after a few seconds would revert to the first message. I found a good deal of information and a lot of misinformation for configuring MMS APN settings, however most of the information was for other phones models and from 2010 or 2011 before GDR2 was out. Apparently in earlier OS’s you needed to download an app to configure these settings.

The Solution and the Correct Configurations

Finally I launched a support ticket StraightTalk via their website. I chose the email option because I find it more convenient. When you do this, make sure you have the last 15 digits of your SIM ID handy. The information they sent me was generic and designed for most Lumia devices so the fields didn’t match my Lumia 520.

Below however explains how to configure those settings in order for MMS to work correctly on a 520. I am running GDR3, but I believe the configurations for MMS are the same on GDR2 which is the default OS for the 520.

The most important first step is to delete the MMS APN settings that are currently there. To get to the configuration, go to Settings\cellular. Swipe to the lower part of the screen to find “edit mms apn”. Press the “X” at the bottom of the screen to delete the current settings.

After you delete the settings they still appear, so you need to reboot your 520.

After rebooting, go back to Settings\cellular and “edit mms apn”.

Below are two screenshots of the parameters which need to be set. You need to swipe down to get to all the fields in the second screenshot.

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Here are the fields and entries for those who cannot view the images:

APN: tfdata
User name: (leave blank)
Password: (leave blank)
WAP gateway (URL): mms3.tracfone.com
WAP gateway port: 80
MMSC (URL): http://mms-tf.net/
MMSC port: 80
Maximum MMS size: (leave blank)

After entering the items, have someone send you a text with an attachment to test out. I hope this helps. I have not tested these settings on other GDR2/3 Lumia devices, but I would venture to guess that they would work as well.