Since my phone is under warranty, and since the main reason I have it is that I’m on call 24/7 for work, I’m not too eager to jailbreak my phone yet. Sure, it’s tempting, but I’m just not going to do it yet.

But here’s my problem, and the really roundabout way I want to solve it. A monitoring script will send me a text message whenever a service fails on a server. Sometimes it’s just a few messages a week, but sometimes, when it rains, it pours. I probably have a couple thousand text messages on my phone. I’d like to clean them out. For some reason (everyone I know has asked for this feature), there is no way to delete all your text messages.

People who have jailbroken their phones seem to have found that the text messages are stored in something like a Berkeley DB file. That’d be pretty easy to clean out. (Actually, people who have jailbroken their phone can install one of many applications meant specifically for purging your SMS inbox, but I digress. Further digression: someone else mentioned that it seems they’re ‘marked as deleted’ when you delete them, but not actually removed from the .db file.)

Is there a way to mount your iPhone as a disk? I’m yet to find it if there is. There exist tools to create a folder on the iPhone and let you access that on your computer, but not to view the ‘guts’ of the iPhone as a filesystem. I was able to make this happen on my old iPod, but not on the iPhone.

There seem to be a handful of ‘secret’ (not anymore, thanks to the Internet…) ways of resetting the firmware and whatnot. I’m wondering if any of them allow disk access. Thoughts, anyone?