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Spammy text (SMS) messages.
Some of you might get a few of them each day, others perhaps the odd one or two a week. Maybe you're lucky enough not to receive any. It does sound familiar though, right?
It should do as this is where we were with email around 15-20 years ago.
This week's MoneySavingExpert newsletter (a popular consumer watchdog site in the UK with many millions of subscribers) had a great guide to stopping unwanted text messages, outlining the different types of unwanted texts that users might receive and what they can do to stop them. The guide does well to explain when you should and shouldn't text STOP to the sender since in some cases this can have undesired effects. The key message, though, should be that if you are in any doubt as to whether a message is spam or not, do not reply to it.
This guide, along with last month's research from uSwitch, is yet more evidence that the threat of SMS spam is now real. The GSMA have made it one of their top priorities this year and at Cloudmark we are supporting the GSMA by making detailed analysis tools available to mobile operators to help them quickly, and in some detail, understand the sorts of threats that their customers are receiving. The GSMA Spam Reporting Service provides a clearinghouse of messaging spam reports submitted by mobile consumers from participating mobile networks around the world.
Whilst the MoneySavingExpert guide is aimed at UK users, readers in other countries should check with their own mobile providers to see if they already have a spam reporting service in place. A number of them will also use the 7726 short code (which spells out SPAM on a telephone keypad). Such a reporting service should mimic the 'Report Spam' button you might already be familiar with within your email client/service. In the future, we would hope to see a 'Report Spam' button built in to all messaging clients on mobile phones.
What's in it for you as a mobile consumer? Well you shouldn't have to see the same spammy SMS messages over and over so by reporting them you will be helping to reduce the number of messages you receive, as well as others.