Spam email has been with us now for such a long time that it has become part of the general noise level of the Internet. Better spam filtering programs have made it a mere annoyance, and most of the Internet user population has now been sensitized to all the ads for male impotence drugs and the like, and don't respond. Most of today's spam can just be (and is) ignored.
As a result, the spammers are looking for fresh territory to spread their often bogus and illegal schemes. They need to find venues in which it is more difficult to ignore or delete the spam, thus possibly getting our attention. One of these new schemes just found me and I am quite annoyed.
It all started the other night, when my cell phone rang a ring tone that was not one of my normal tones. It turns out that it was the tone signaling the arrival of a text message. For those of us not aware, text messaging is using your cell phone to send, if you will, written email instead of voice. Text messaging is apparently very popular with the young crowd, mostly because the messages can be sent with no noise, such as during school classes. There are even loads of text messaging abbreviations and cute phrases.
But I don't text message, and had no plans to. Oh, my phone had the capability, but I wasn't interested. Apparently someone else was. At about 7PM, two text messages appeared advertising (you guessed it) Viagra. I immediately called my cell carrier (Alltel) and after the usual wait was able to discuss the situation with them. This is what I found, and apparently it also applies to most other cell carriers.
Text messages can be sent from phone to phone. But they can also originate via standard email. In Alltel's case, all you have to do to send a text message from any standard email program is to send the email to <10 digit phone number>@message.alltel.com. If you go to the Alltel website, the first page has a click to send a text message. The point being: any spammer can send you a text message if they just guess your phone number by finding out your cell company's area code and exchange, and then just randomly or in sequence generating the emails. And that is how my spam came in.
The issue in cell spam is that there are no spam filters, and you are much more likely to have to view the spam message, even to just delete it. And deleting it requires more keypresses than when using a standard keyboard. But the biggest issue is that the text messages cost! Even if you have a cell phone plan that gives you lots of minutes, it may not give you free text messaging. In my case, I have oodles of free minutes, but each text message costs $.08. Not much, but if I start getting cell spam in the quantities that I get email spam, the cost could add up.
So, what can be done about it? The Alltel rep was not to reassuring. He said that the only thing I could do was to turn off text messaging entirely. I was about to do that, until he mentioned that this would also cause me to lose pending voice mail notification, as that uses text messaging. I need to get my voice messages for my business, so turning that off was not feasible.
So, I am going to wait and see what happens. So far, I have only received two messages, and also two appeared on my wife's cell. But the problem is looming, and I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Check on text messaging on your phone system.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)