TYPO REPORT: Just to be clear . . . the brackets shown above around "cell-phone number" are just to represent setting off the number. They do not appear in either of the actual e-mail aliases.

Further update: I now have some error messages I believe are related. In fact, I had one or two earlier, but thought they were just junk/spam texts -- partly because all I got were truncated versions, basically "Undelivered message", etc. from "mailer-daemon@" plus a very long server name. Some of the server/host names (truncated) are:

twbgohaavzwvmta-c-rh-cmta-01-mms-00-vt twbgohaavzwvmta-c-rh-cmta-01-sms-01-vtext bbtpnj33vzwvmta-c-rh-cmta-01-sms-01-vtext-c

Now, some parts of these ungainly strings do look familiar. As noted above, when the text-from-phone-to-PC function was working (up to a week or so ago), I would get plain-text SMS messages from my phone with the sending address

[cell-phone number]@vtext.com

and SMS messages with files attached from

[cell-phone number]@mypixmessages.com

Some searching around with DuckDuckGo suggests that the former domain is associated with Verizon (and likely the latter as well). My wife and I have been getting our cell-phone service from StraightTalk Wireless, but I suppose they've been bought out by Verizon by now.

So I've been trying to contact STW tech service, and gotten not too far before accomplishing this much research; I'll try again today. But can anyone here give me a shortcut to restoring one of the main things I've used my cell phone for? (Doing research and writing notes for myself on my phone (which I can carry around with me, even to bed) and then getting the info to my longer-term memory in my PC, that is.)

If your cell is a smartphone, I think it would be easier to set up an IMAP account on the phone and in TB, so that any messages you send to yourself are accessible on both devices. There's probably a neater way to share notes between a phone and a PC.

Thank you very much for your suggestion. A few notes in reply:

• I don't do e-mail on the phone at all.

• I've been doing this with no problems for over two years on this phone, and for more years before that on other Samsung phones. (And the account is an SMTP account, FWIW.)

• It's only from my phone to my PC that there's a problem at all. I can still exchange texts with my wife, my two sisters, and the old high-school friend who kindly let me set up my e-mail address in/under his private domain (named after an old family name in his family).

Does any of that affect your advice?