Showing posts with the label sms

Email-to-SMS no more?

Email-to-SMS gateways were once a popular tool for email geeks and savvy sysadmins to ping themselves with important notifications. Nowadays? They're either dead and gone, in the process of shutting down, or problematic enough that we can't even tell if they're still alive. Verizon's vtext.com: Shutting down by the end of March 2027 . AT&T's  txt.att.net : Shut down …
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Tom Mairs: Combating RCS spam

Tom Mairs is co-founder of Kumo Corp . If you're not familiar, they're " Building the first Open-Source MTA made especially for large-volume senders. " Tom's also got a personal blog full of random musings and I thought it would be useful to link to his v…

Texas SMS requirements: Talking SB140 with Mickey Chandler

Life (and compliance) can get tricky sometimes for marketers, and here is a perfect example. Texas recently amended SMS marketing requirements in a potentially scary way; the updated compliance requirements even mandate registering with the state and securing a $10,000 bond. Bu…

Oops, that wasn’t a scam!

This one hurts a little. We've all gotten scammy-looking toll payment texts. Most of the time, they're fakes. But one California driver found out the hard way that ignoring them isn't always safe. USA Today tells the story of a woman who, like many of us, started r…

iOS 26 and the anger of the Unknown Senders

Wesley Hilliard at Apple Insider covers  a story that has certain political fundraising groups up in arms : Apple's upcoming iOS 26 release will start automatically sorting messages from unknown numbers into a new "Unknown Senders" category. That means no notifica…

AT&T to shut down email-SMS gateway

Way back in 2020, I shared how you can utilize various cellular provider gateways to send an email to a certain address and have it land as a text message on a mobile device. Today, it looks like AT&T is getting out of that business, having announced that they're shutt…

Don't fall for smishing scams

What's a smish? This is a smish , phishing via text messages. They're coming fast and furiously lately, the latest template seems to be all about fake toll road fines. Trust me, SunPass, iPass and EZPass are not going to text you weird links to try to get you to pay up.…

List unsubscribe ... for Android RCS messages?

In certain email clients and webmail providers, like Gmail, the mailbox provider utilizes the list-unsubscribe header to offer up an in-app "unsubscribe" button that shows up above or next to an email message, saving a subscriber from having to scroll down to an emai…

iPhone users: dealing with spam messages

This isn't anything TOO earth shattering, but it was a nice collection of tips all in once place, so I thought it would be a good thing to share. (And I'm in Detroit today, so I didn't have much time to spend on the blog.) Maisie Bovingdon, writing for the Irish Mir…

Verizon Wireless users: Disabling inbound email-to-SMS

You know how you can send an email message to a certain address, and it'll be converted into a text message and sent to a certain cell phone? There's a whole guide on how to do this; different cell phone providers have different domain names. For Verizon Wireless users…

Pelosi campaign settles with Illinois man over SMS spam

Are political messages exempt from the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? As the FCC explains , while campaigns are exempt from the "do not call" list requirements, the TCPA does still bring specific rules that even political campaigns must follow.…

Apple iOS 16 bonus: report SMS spam!

Mobile providers have been suggesting this for a while now (here's me talking about  Verizon  and this service apparently goes back ten years ) -- report that SMS spam so that somebody can do something about it! But the reporting process (at least on iPhone) was clunky. Man…

Verizon Wireless says: Forward SMS spam to 7726

I think Verizon Wireless has supported reporting SMS spam to them via the 7726 (SPAM) SMS number for a while now. I'm not really sure when that started, but very recently, Verizon's Alex Lawson posted a blog post talking about 7726. Check it out here . TL;DR? Forward un…

Verizon bolsters spam protection features

Mike Robuck of Mobile World Live reports on a new SMS and call spam protection option for Verizon Wireless users here in the US: an updated free Call Filter app . I just downloaded it myself and it seemed pretty easy to set up. I recommend checking it out. Of course, they immed…

How to Send a Text Message Via Email

I'm not sure how the website " 20somethingfinance.com " ended up being a good resource for this, but that's where I found the most information when I started doing my research. Just to be safe, I'm going to share their same info here just in case that webs…

Egypt’s economic court fines insecticide company for SMS spam

Sometimes those of us with a quite-possibly-myopic worldview might assume that outside of North America and Europe, spam regulation doesn't exist. Well, here's an example where Egypt's National Telecom Regulatory Authority filed a complaint against an insecticide c…

SMS Spam in the News

SMS (text messaging) spam is frustrating, and blatantly illegal. Sadly, it's not always easily prosecuted, as the bad actors engaging in this practice often hide behind redirectors, falsehoods, and pseudonyms. So it is always a gleeful moment when I read of somebody trackin…

SMS Spam: Google Voice is Helpful

That we can now report SMS spam to various wireless carriers is a good thing, but the process is still overly complicated and I'm doubtful that enough people take the time to report SMS spam received. I have Verizon Wireless, and the spam reporting robot gets confused and,…

Cloudmark developing SMS spam filter

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 ne…

AT&T's 'American Idol' Text Message Stunt Backfires

Consumerist has the story. Some random (but large) number of AT&T subscribers got SMS-spammed by their cell provider. Lame. The NY Times quotes Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, saying that the message went to subscribers who had voted for “Idol” singers in …