I’ve recently learned that most major cell phone carriers have a setup where you can send an email to a certain address (usually <telephone number>@example.com) and it will get sent as a text message to the owner of the phone.
This surprised me, since I would assume such a system would invite spam by the bucketfull. It’s a simple known address space and it’s easy to come up with a sender to spoof; the service provider is always sending out random messages.
Yet, it doesn’t seem to. At least, my phone hasn’t yet offered me viagra.
I do get lots of spam text messages to my Japanese cell phone (although it pales in comparison to the staggering volume of spam email to my phone I used to get before I chose a long and complicated address). I have never had a spam text message to my Canadian cell phone, though.
The same way you send unlimited emails for free. I can send an email to any cell phone I can get the number for, and it will show up as a text message on the phone. The recipient might get charged for receiving the text message (depending on his plan), but how could I be charged? Is gmail going to send me a bill for $0.05? They don’t even know who I am.
Cellphone charging plans are quite different here in the UK (we established that the other day, for example the recipient is never charged for incoming calls).
In order to send a text messages to a phone, it has to travel across a network and in the UK, there always seems to be a charge for that; there are websites where you can sign up and send a number of free messages per month (they include a mini-ad banner), but as far as I know, all of the email-to-text services here are either something that you would have to sign up and pay for to be able to send, or would have to subscribe to in order to receive.
There’s little benefit since I can’t easily click on the stupid links that are usually included in the spam message. Although this may change as more and more displays are touch-interface capable. And for those few who have internet browsing capability on their cell phones, I wager they are unlikely to waste airtime punching in URLs from text messages.
I do get spam from my service provider, trying to entice me to buy one of their extra services, but they’ll only be paying cost price to send the message.
I also get occasional texts associated with third party telesales - I get a phone call asking me if I want to upgrade my handset; I hang up and within a minute I get a text making the same offer; I believe the company sending these will be paying (perhaps bulk prices) to send me the message, but that’s presumably just part of their margin.
None of those prevent spammers from flooding in-boxes. I’ve gotten plenty of spam that doesn’t even include any links in it. The vast majority of people aren’t likely to waste their time at all on links embedded in spam. Yet it keeps coming.
Web-capable phones (or at least some of them) render URLs as proper links in the text messaging interface (at least mine does); embedded numbers and email addresses are similarly linked and activating them dials the number or fires up the mail client.
From a techie point of view, the easiest way to handle this would be to limit each IP sending to 1 message over some very long period of time (this type of option is called “Tarpitting” on the mail server we use) - if you can’t send but one message every 10 minutes, say, it would be pretty difficult to have any kind of real spamming without an absolute army of spam sending machines, and I would bet spammers could get a better return sending to normal emails with an army of machines, rather than a few people on phones.
99% of all the (email) spam I get is illegal, under both US and EU law. (The other 1% should be illegal, but that’s another discussion.)
Illegality is not something that concerns spammers much, so it’s not what’s stopping phone spam.
My best guess is that phone networks are much more regulated and controled by individual companies than the internet, so it is not half as easy to distribute spam without being traceable.
Someone suggested to me they were charged when someone rang them from abroad
I get plenty of those spam txts from using those free text message services online. They still come through, maybe once a fortnight, months after I used those text services.