Cell phone spam
I recently noticed this survey on cell phone spam (via What Japan Thinks), and can vouch for the fact that it is a constant problem with no particularly good solution (at least, none that I am aware of).
Although the volume of spam that comes to my cell phone (probably between five and ten messages a day) is far less than the volume that gets directed at my primary e-mail address (lots!), the difference is that there are far more robust filtering options available for traditional e-mail than are typically offered by the companies providing such services for cell phones.
On my cell phone there are only a few options for filtering spam, all of which basically boil down to specifying categories of messages that should just be ignored, but the problem is that the settings are overly broad and cannot be fine-tuned in any meaningful way. You either reject all mail not sent from other cell phones or you accept everything, for example. (That might be a bit of an overstatement, but not by much.) This is not a very viable set of alternatives for what I would consider "normal" e-mail use, so I end up accepting everything to make sure that I don’t miss something that might be important, like a message from a potential new client.
With my regular mail, however, spam filtering options abound, so even though a lot of spam is sent to my address, almost none of it ever makes it into my inbox (thanks to MailFoundry, which I would really like to see phone companies introduce to stem spam), and even if it does, it will typically get zapped almost immediately by the spam-filtering functions of whichever mail application I am using, which is not a function I’ve seen in most phones.
Why is it that phone companies do not takea much harder line on spam? The survey results indicate that it is pretty clearly a common problem. My pet theory is that the reason is two-fold: (A) They don’t get enough complaints about it to justify taking additional actions and (B) they charge you for the spam you receive anyway, so their motivation to eliminate that particular stream of revenue is too low for them to act on. Those are my ideas, anyway; I welcome anyone who is better informed about these things to set me straight.
