Years ago when hardly any of my friends were into texting, I used
to archive my SMS messages sent/received by retyping them all into
my computer manually once or twice a year (yeah, I know, I'm a dork)

A couple years ago I got a new phone (a Nokia 6300) with more
memory, and more and more of my friends started texting, so now I
have a couple thousand messages in my phone and was beginning to
worry about either losing my phone or having to waste many hours
one day in a mad typing session trying to catch up.

I made a few half-hearted attempts over the years to research
automatic ways of reading messages from my phone or SIM card, but
never managed to find anything.

A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop (which I
highly recommend) so I thought it would be worth checking if its
updated software includes SMS message readers.

I found one called wammu which is great -- it has a wizard to
autodetect my phone via various connection types (I used
bluetooth, which I had never used before), and within a few
seconds I had downloaded my phonebook and SMS messages.

It even has options to export the text messages in various
formats including XML, mbox, maildir, and IMAP. (I had always
wanted to hack something up to convert mine to mboxes, and
wammu's mboxes are way better than what I would have come up
with: the From: headers include both names and phone numbers
based on my contact list; the Date: includes a timezone, etc.)

wammu also lets you read various things over USB cable, but
doesn't support text message download via USB with this phone.

(another cool thing: when I plugged my phone in via USB cable,
ubuntu popped up a window offering to set up a modem connection)

It seems to have downloaded only 200 of my Sent messages; I'll
have to investigate what happened to the rest.

All of this is probably hilarious to those of you who have owned
the full series of crackberries/iphones/whatever and always had
them set up to autosync everything both ways, but it's new to me.
(If I had to commute anywhere I would have fancier gizmos but I
stopped commuting 9 years ago ;)

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/