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.
Cellphone spam is one of the main reasons why I refuse to use email on my mobile. When I’m traveling and need email access, I bring my laptop and use my mobile to connect when wireless isn’t available.
If you want to use email from your mobile, how about getting a provider with mobile-friendly web mail, and having mail sent there instead of directly to your phone? That way, you can take advantage of the good filtering options already available.
Thanks for the comment, Ryan.
I have tried using my Gmail account from my phone, but I use that account primarily for mailing list subscriptions, which means that it gets thousands of messages on any given day, far more than you can comfortably cope with on the tiny screen of a cell phone.
More recently, I have signed up for an account at auone.jp, which is essentially Gmail branded specifically for au/KDDI users. Ironically, it has a built-in function for automatically saving all of your cell phone mail to your au one account, which in my case means they’ve simply doubled my spam problem by duplicating the spam that comes to my phone at the Web mail account.
The problem with Web-based mail accounts, though, is that I don’t get notified when there is new mail at those accounts (unlike when mail comes to my phone), so I have to go and check regularly. Because my primary reason for using mail on my cell phone is to be able to respond quickly to family members, friends, and clients who generally want to receive responses immediately, having to check for new messages all the time is less than ideal.
Still searching for a good solution to this problem, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be one....
Hi Sako:
I guess I hadn’t considered that aspect. I have my clients pretty well trained (PC speak: “educated”
to call me when they need to contact me right away.
I recently got an invitation to join mixi, and saw that they now *require* both regular and mobile email verification to join. I decided not to join because of that requirement, but I admit to feeling a bit like a dinosaur by refusing to use mobile email.
I suspect client education would work to some extent, but I fear that I would most likely be educating them to contact other translators first, which would be unfortunate. As much as the folks on Honyaku talk about getting better clients, the fact remains that clients are not infinitely replaceable.
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