- Step #1: Investigate Whitelist and Blacklist Software for Both SMS and E-Mail Messages for Your Mobile Users (or Develop Your Own)
- Step #2: Stay Up-to-Date On the Growing Problem of Wireless Spam with Virus Payloads, and Prepare Patches and Other Defenses
- Step #3: Find Better Ways to Filter the Messages that Get Routed to Mobile Devices
- Step #4: Make Sure that Your Carrier Knows You're Concerned About Mobile Spam
- Step #5: Institute an Enterprise Policy that Protects Against Wireless Spam
- Step #6: Get Serious About the Problem
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Step #4: Make Sure that Your Carrier Knows You're Concerned About Mobile Spam
Particularly if you're with a large enough company to make your demands heard, communicate with your carrier regarding SMS messages. Make it clear that you want aggressive filtering and reasonable billing policies in place.
Right now, the way SMS works, even if the message received is pure, 100 percent lunch meat, your provider expects you and your users to pay 5 to 10 cents for the honor of receiving it. But maybe if enough aggrieved enterprise IT and telecom managers read carriers the riot act on this subject, they'll begin to offer credits if the spam influx reaches a given overflow level.
Yes, the carriers already do have spam filters on their SMS gateways—and in some cases, they offer a Web-based service allowing users to blacklist specific SMS spammer addresses—but in time, that probably won't be enough. When lots of spammy SMS messages begin flooding U.S. mobile users' inboxes over the next year or two, modest best-effort protections from the carriers won't cut it. So keeping the pressure on never hurts.