Hey, this is cool: According to Engadget, Cloudmark seems to be working on the next frontier of spam filtering: SMS spam. Give it a few years, and something like this will be baked into every provider's infrastructure or handsets. Can't wait.
On an unrelated note, I never got a drop of SMS spam in the years that I was a T-Mobile customer. Last week I switched to Verizon (iPhone 4!), and within a few days, I got my first SMS/billing scam, from somebody called SendMe Mobile, where they tried to sign me up to a $9.99/mo SMS trivia thing without my consent. I wonder if I'm going to see more of these kinds of things, now that I've moved to the US wireless provider with the largest customer base.
Cool!
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've been told, SMS spam is a huge problem in Asia, where text messages are very cheap, whereas in Europe the problem is (was? This is informaton from two years ago) near non-existent, because text messages are outrageously expensive.
My guess is we'll get to an approved sender situation.
ReplyDeletei.e. you set your handset to accept SMS from numbers in your addressbook or to which you've previously called or sent a message.
I get SMS spam all the time now and it really makes me mad because under my current plan, I have to pay for each one! That should not be legal.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait for this filter. Goodbye "Work from home!" spam!
Oh, I keep forgetting some plans in the US make you pay for each message. For those people spam must be a huge pain.
ReplyDelete@Derek: whitelists should be dead easy to implement. But would it work in practise? What about those "I lost my phone, here's my new number" messages?