Cell Phone Spam
When I was first introduced to the idea of getting emails on my cell phone, I thought it was a great idea. Despite the fact that cell phones aren’t the easiest input devices, I liked the ability to send and received emails on the go. Who wouldn’t?
But I didn’t like the fact that Cingular, my cell phone service provider, automatically assigned my phone an alphanumeric email address with the format PHONENUMBER@mobile.mycingular.net. It was too long, hard to remember, and not very aesthetically pleasing. So I came up with the not-so-great solution of email forwarding. I could set up an easy-to-remember email address through a company that offered free email, and could forward those emails to my phone. That way, anyone trying to send an email to my phone would only need to remember the new email address instead of the long address Cingular assigned.
I signed up with Bigfoot, and created an easy-to-remember address. Shortly after signing up, I started receiving emails on my phone as planned. But Bigfoot started sending account notifications and reminders to my phone. And since larger emails were broken up into smaller individual messages on my phone (1 of 3, 2 of 3, etc.) it wasn’t uncommon for me to get 7 or 8 unsolicited messages at a time on my phone, most of which were junk.
To make things worse, I had made my Bigfoot account address publically known by posting it online. Through the use of spambots or some other tool, spammers got ahold of my Bigfoot account, and the cell phone spam started to take off. I’m not sure if Bigfoot sells its users’ email addresses to third parties, but I haven’t ruled that possibility out.
After a few weeks, spam made up a majority of my phone’s email. I was signed up for a plan through Cingular that allowed for 200 emails a month, and I was approaching that limit in just spam. I had no choice but to disable email service.
That was over a year ago. Last week I upgraded my phone to a Motorola V400 camera phone, and in order to really use the camera function I needed to re-enable multimedia messaging. Sure enough, I started receiving the same emails as before, as the spammers had apparently still retained my phone’s email address. This time, however, I was not signed up for a multimedia messaging plan, which meant I would be charged $0.10-$0.25 per email, whether inbound or outbound.
To avoid unsolicted emails (and a large bill) I contacted Bigfoot, and redirected the forwarded emails to a different account. Hopefully this will solve the problem, but only time will tell. Unfortunately, Cingular offers no service at this time for cell phone spam protection, but they charge for received spam.
So what’s the moral of all this? To learn from my mistakes:
1.) If you plan on using your cell phone for email don’t make the email address public. Eliminate the potential for abuse, and definitely keep it off the web.
2.) If you must make your cell phone public, consider going using an email-forwarding service. Doing so allows you to “switch off” your spam if it becomes excessive. Keep in mind that if you do sign up for email forwarding, you might get promos or notifications from the company you signed up with. Most importantly, remember your login and password for the email forwarding service, so that you can disable it if you have to.
Until someone comes up with an effective solution to spam as a whole, it seems that there’s some huge potential for someone to market a solution for cell phone spam. It’s too bad cell phone providers aren’t proactive enough to begin offering phone spam management tools, as I think this “problem” can only get worse as wirelss device capabilities and wrieless email usage increases.
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FREE incoming with Virgin Mobile.This is a prepaid service, and ASTONISHINGLY even if you’re out of minutes, you can still receive texts. Dont know if they have regular billing plans, but they are the best value prepaid. Very happy with reliability of service and customer service people.