Edit A SMS In The s60 Inbox

Here is something I tried today as I was feeling the need to create a controversy… One can actually change the contents of the SMS messages you receive in your inbox

A few things to remember before I begin:

• Doing this can create a lot of trouble for the sender and recipient and also people related to both.
• I tried this on my 6600 and this can be done on any s60 phone, not sure about N-Series or SE or Motorola, you can try it and let me know.
• Take a backup of the original content you are going to change incase some error crops up.

What you need:

1. A Cellphone, s60 based (6600 in this case).
2. A Memory card.
3. Message to be edited should be on the Memory Card.
4. A Memory Card Reader.
5. A PC.
6. A hex editor (hex workshop in this case).

Tutorial:

Put the Memory Card in the card reader connect it to the PC.

Browse to the system folder (it is hidden so make sure your folder options on the PC are set to show hidden files).

In the system folder go to mail folder. You might find a lot of folders here. Browse through them till you find a folder which contains many folders named only in 1 digit or alphabet.

You will see many files here.

This is the tough part finding the message you want to edit. (open the files in notepad and you will see the message).

Once you have found out the message you want to edit open it in notepad you will see the message between some un-recognized characters.

Now open the message in the hex editor, in this case hex workshop the center screen shows the hex equivalent and the right pane shows the same content you saw in the notepad that is the message.
This is the fun part, the hex workshop that I am using replaces the characters in the message so if the message is- ‘hello’ and you take the cursor to ‘h’ and press ‘m’ it will become ‘mello’ so if you want change ‘i hate u’ to ‘i love u’ take the cursor to ‘h’ and type ‘love’ now ‘hate’ will be replaced with ‘love’ and if you want remove unwanted lines just replace them with ‘space’ now save it.

Replace the existing file in the Memory Card same location, same name and the result – message has been edited, same date, same time, same sender, different message.

At times you might get an error while opening the message on your phone: my 6600 gave me: system error (-25) which I think means that you have not correctly replaced the characters of the message.

Happy Editing.