Someone told me something like that too, but on closer scrutiny, they were talking about a friend-of-a-friend, and it was a variant of this hoax (a variant wherein you would be charged just for picking up the call).
Googling OFTEL “calling party pays” turns up a buch of documentation appearing to indicate that in the UK, there is regulation to prevent telecoms companies from charging their customers for incoming calls. Of course, the cost gets redistributed across other things they can charge you for, so in a sense, we’re paying, just not on an event-billed basis.
So are junk faxes, but that doesn’t stop anyone. I’ve always figured it’s a combonation of that AND the cell phone providers being VERY vigilant about tracking down and suing any cell phone spamers and/or monitoring text messages and getting rid of any spam. If people get tons and tons of spam on their cell phones, they’ll just have the text message part of their service turned off = less money for providers.
Shortly after I got my cel phone, I started receiving spam text. Just like e-mail.
My phone was not set up for web-access. My phone was an already obsolete brick, so we weren’t that worried about it.
It got up to about 15 texts per day, usually. My wife works for our service provider, and nobody could figure out why or how this was happening.
I eventually had to block all e-mail from my phone (which shouldn’t have been getting e-mail in the first place) and that seems to have solved the problem.
Verizon, btw. Other than that, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them… which I’m sure has nothing to do with my wife working for them.
I occasionally get spam text for my phone, too, but more often than not I get spam voice mail messages about how I won an exciting vacation to Florida. :rolleyes: (Um…thanks, but I already live in Boca.)
I think you have the answer. Someone like Vodafone is going to want payment for anything sent over its network to its subscribers, and also has pretty much total control over what gets sent.
Email spam is such a problem because the marginal cost per message is effectively zero - however even at one cent per hundred texts, sending millions of them would cost a packet. So it does happen but isn’t so common.
This doesn’t really answer the OP’s question. In the US, you can send text messages for free via email, using email addresses set up by each provider that are typically based on the subscriber’s phone number. If you had a list of area codes and the prefixes within them that belong to each cell provider (not hard to find), you could easily email a text message to each possible number within those prefixes. Question is, why doesn’t anyone do it?
Just to concrete the major unanswered point here (and sorry for restating what’s already been said), to send me a message on my sprint cell phone, anyone can send a message to 6145551234@messaging.sprintpcs.com (obviously not my real number).
I receive plenty of valid emails a day that way. None from spammers. An email client can send to that address, or a person can anonymously use a messaging sight like this.
I can’t begin to answer why we don’t get more, other than the usual guesses about filtering, et cetera…
For everyone in the chain from the spammer to your email inbox, the cost of spam is mainly measured in annoyance. None of them have any significant incentive to do that much about it. For a mobile provider, transmitting a bunch of text messages would cost a lot in terms of strain on infrastructure, potentially to the point of flooding the network and forcing them to drop paid-for text messages that are worth lots of revenue. So they have a very big incentive to do lots of tarpitting and so on to keep the spam load down. And spammers aren’t going to get very far sending one email every 30 seconds or whatever. You need to push out millions and millions of emails to make any cash, which means the target system needs to accept hundreds of addresses in the cc or bcc fields, or else many emails per second.
This is all speculation of course, although hopefully some telecom Dopers will give us the SD on this.
Nevertheless it would be interesting to see what happened if you were to try sending out bulk emails to those free email addresses, or send multiple messages rapidly.
Since spammers are already sending out millions of emails, it would be easy to insert mobile phone addresses every once in a while, and beat any rate-limiting filter.
We can go back and forth on possible technical solutions and workarounds, but for anyone who suggests that a technical solution is responsible for the lack of spam, why wouldn’t the same solution work for spam email?
I think these types of filters normally sit on the receiving mailserver, i.e. in this case the box that the mobile operator uses to translate incoming emails into text messages. It would be relatively simple to set up a throughput limitation, and it wouldn’t care how many other people you are bothering, just how many messages you are trying to send through it to its customers. If mail.mobiletext.net refuses to receive more than 1 mail per second from spamserver.garbage.net, it’s not that easy to defeat.
Plus, given that mobile operators in the UK at least seem to have no compunction about reducing network load by redirecting text messages to /dev/null at busy times (despite having charged the people who sent them), I would imagine that they would also have no problem ignoring anything sent to mail.mobiletext.net above a certain total threshold too, so even if you use spoofing and redirects to hide the sending location, they can still screen large spammings.
Probably the reason these limits work with texts but not email is that the internet is basically built to send emails cheaply and reliably in a decentralised manner. Mobile networks are VERY centralised and not that efficient at sending texts. So for email it’s cheaper to just transmit all the crap and leave it for the customer to sort out, whereas with texts its more cost-effective to trim it out. Or perhaps it’s just that short texts are easier to filter than long emails. Or perhaps mobile firms like their customers more than ISPs and want to be nice to us :dubious:
[Mrs Doyle]Oh go on. Go on. Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on. You know you want to. Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on.[/Mrs Doyle]
