There is nothing more frustrating and boring than the latest craze of SMS spam. We have got used to it on our computers where round about half of all emails are spam (and in fact most of them are attributable to just two or three botnet sources) but now we are getting them on our mobile phones. And it is worse in the developing world than in Europe. In India alone 100,000,000 spam SMS messages are transmitted every single day.
But it seems that a solution is close at hand. A new anti-spam software system called SMSAssassin is being developed. The filtering of SMS messages is not new; there are several systems that work in a similar manner to email filtering. These read email messages and use pattern and word matching with known to identify suspicious messages which are flagged up as suspected spam or are automatically deleted. The problem it that whilst these are reasonably effective with email spam, they are less so with SMS messages as those tend to be quite brief. Their brevity means that it is very difficult to spot items in the message that uniquely identifies it as spam.
Rather than just examining individual messages SMSAssassin attempts to use crowd sourced spam identifiers where users transmit and receive spam keywords from other users. This spam marker sharing occurs either through a central server or by direct transmission between phones using Bluetooth.
This means that when new spam is quickly identified particularly when spam is targeted at large gatherings, for instance rock festivals, sports events, and in particular the London Olympics. Currently the software has been developed to run on Nokia phones such as the Xperia which use the Symbian operating system but versions are also under development that will run on Android phones and phones that use Windows Mobile.
Not everybody is convinced that this system will offer much more protection from spam than current systems, however the developers are confident that it will work. It is thought that the 2012 Olympics will prove to be a magnet for SMS spammers and the hope is that SMSAssassin will stop them in their tracks. Head over to phones4u for more infomation.
