I imagine you would go to cingular.com and register an account. Then you can manage your account on your computer. I don't have a cingular account, so I am not positive, but there is likely a place in your account to check messages.

This does not cover checking texts, this covers downloading texts to a computer. I am the father of a 14 & a 16 year old 22 year old in college. We have a blended family spread out all over. Truly, my wife and I trust the oldest two, but the younger one is very difficult to trust with a cell phone and text messaging. We contacted AT&T corporate folks as well as corporate stores. They provided very little guidance. With 5, yes FIVE, iPhones, and 3 Mac laptops, in the family, all on the same account, I must say, you either pay for piece of mind that you know the family can speak with each other when needing to plan holidays with step-parents and the kids going in different directions, the oldest two drive their own vehicles. The texting issue with the youngest child has become everything but a legal issue so far. The 14 year old finds no problem with sexually explicit dialogue after many discussions with teachers, guidance counselors, principals, police officers and other adults. We have unlimited texting for the family to stay in touch, but we also do not support those who send unnecessary or improper verbage in the texts. I had to purchase software from the internet after searching for quite some time that carried the ability to DOWNLOAD text messages. I would randomly take the youngest child's phone view the messages and DOWNLOAD all messages. There was another nice feature the software included allowing the number, date, time and whether it was sent to the phone or received by the phone. This allowed me to retain the messages and keep a file of them. I tried to convince the child this was not acceptable behavior and since then the child has permanently forfieted use of the phone. AT&T does offer a "SmartLimits" feature for their iPhones and possible other phones as well for parents to purchase for $4.99 per month. That did stop texting with the iPhone, but not if the SIM card is switched to a GOPHONE. Checking the text on a computer is not an option that I am aware of after being a cinglar customer for over 4 years now. There is software on the market that claims to dig into the phone and retrieve DELETED messages if the need is there. I purchased my software through "www.ecamm.com" and it works very well. The software I purchased DOES NOT retrieve DELETED text messages.