dottocomu

Cellphone spam: Extinction in sight?

Spam to cellphones in Japan may not be long for this world. You can now choose to receive mail only from the domains you specify, effectively killing PC-originated spam. Spammers who switch to using cellphones to spam other phones on the same network are rapidly finding themselves cut off. The only really viable option left is to use a cellphone to spam addresses on another carrier's network, but even that's getting harder as carriers become increasingly willing to take offenders to court. The spammers are therefore resorting to a tactic that smacks of desperation: paying random members of the public money to take out phone contracts to give the spammer a "virgin" terminal to work with.

The main spam route seems to be from KDDI to DoCoMo, partly for reasons of cost--DoCoMo treats a mail sent to two addresses as two separate mails, and charges for both, whereas KDDI charges for one mail--and partly because of a loophole created by DoCoMo's oversimplified antispam settings. One can either (1) refuse mail from specific addresses, (2) accept only mail from specific addresses, or (3) accept mail from specific domains and from DoCoMo and other carriers' cellphones. The only setting not guaranteed to give one sore thumbs is the last one, and it assumes that all cellphone mail is Good.

This is a daft idea for all sorts of reasons, the simplest being that there are myriad software packages out there that allow one to compose mail on a PC and transfer it to a phone for sending. But surely carriers could more or less eradicate spam from other cellphone networks completely, if they chose to. A couple of ideas that spring to mind:

(1) In DoCoMo's case, how about a "block all Carrier X addresses except these" setting, for starters? A pain to input, perhaps, but better than nothing, especially if you get nothing but spam from Carrier X.

(2) Or, how about finally standardising the infrared ports used in cellphones rather than allowing all the different versions that are running around loose? You could cut the thumbwork at a stroke by swapping addresses via IR, and having any address that's beamed in to your phone added by default to your "receive messages" list. Assuming that spammers do not resort to sniping from the rooftops at exposed infrared ports with high-powered IR data rifles, this sounds fairly safe to me.

[Some facts via an Oct. 7 ZDNet Japan article; opinions and flights of fancy my own]