Stop M-Spam on AT&T (SMS Spam)
Have you ever received spam messages sent as SMS text to your cell phone? Has it happened repeatedly? Yea, it sucks.
Until today, I didn’t think there was anything you could do about it, unless you turn off that service to your phone. Apparently, there is something you can do. While this solution is not perfect, it probably gets close.
David Pogue, NYT columnist and well-known Apple fanboy, wrote an article about protecting yourself from most, if not all of these spam messages. In his article he states:
Shortly thereafter, I heard from an AT&T representative who revealed the presence of an astonishing little-known cellular feature: you can block cellular spam.
“Our customers can get onto our Web site,” he wrote, “and set their handset so that it receives no messages from the Internet, the origin of the vast majority of wireless spam.”
Whoah! Sweet. He gave a brief highlight of how to accomplish it. Here are the details:
#1: AT&T has a special website for managing your “messaging preferences”. This is not on your main account page. Here is a link to the page where they discuss the capabilities of that special site.
#2: If you go to this page and try to enter your AT&T website account info, it won’t work. Yea, pretty lame. You have to register a new account. It will then send an SMS to your cell phone with a registration code that you use to activate your new account.
Once complete, you now have access. NOTE: Turn off your pop-up blocker for this page.
#3: After logging in, it brings you right to “Blocking Options”. You can set what you like, but I blocked it all. This is where Pogue identifies most spam comes from – people using the internet to mail SMS messages.
#4: The article also points out the idea of making an alias that only you and the people you want to know can use for SMS messages. This allows you to still leverage SMS messages, but in a more secure way. Alias creation is accomplished under the “Message Options” link.
That’s basically it. I hope that info helps. Thanks to Mr. Pogue for sending me in the right direction.
