Spam/Not Spam

Verizon recently won a lawsuit against SMS spammers. As e-mail providers, ISPs and enterprises have cracked down on e-mail spam, spammers have looked toward other mediums including instant messaging (discussed in Mike DeMaria's article this month on IM security appliances) and SMS. Carriers have been cracking down on SMS SPAM as of late with some unintended consequences.

In our preliminary testing of Mobile Device Management software for the April 30th issue of Network Computing, two vendors found that SMS messages, sent via e-mail and used to reach mobile endpoints, were being rejected by some carriers (presumably as spam). The same messages sent to other carriers, however, worked fine. Organizations that use SMS, especially via e-mail gateways, for enterprise applications may look to conduct monthly tests with all possible messages to ensure that messages aren't rejected in the fight to prevent SMS SPAM.