SMS Spam and the Siemens S56
I posted this to the S55/S56 forum at club-siemens.net, but thought
I might make it more accessible by putting it here.
The problem
I am receiving about 15-20 spam messages per day via an e-mail-to-SMS
gateway. The problem seems to stem from the e-mail gateway:
[email protected] will send mail to the subscriber with number
XXXYYYZZZZ. Given the limited number of valid XXX and YYY in the US, it
would be trivial for spammers to send spam to all valid combinations of
digits.
AT&T's response
I've spoken with AT&T reps a few times, and they don't have
any good answers for me.
I asked whether they could just disable this gateway for my account:
answer, "No".
I asked about disabling all SMS text messages: answer, "doing so would
disable voicemail notifications". No good for me, as I need voicemail.
AT&T did point me to a quick way to clear out the 117 spams in my
inbox:
Menu -> Messages -> Inbox -> SMS -> Options -> Delete
All (you have to scroll the options menu down to see this option)
Other options
I scoured the S56's menus and piss-poor documentation (don't you hate
manuals that say "Info tones: this enables or disables info tones"
instead of explaining what the hell info tones are?!?!?), but found no
way to turn off alerts for SMS messages.
The best tip I've found so far came from this forum, and it allows me
to turn off the volume for SMS alerts. You can't really turn off
the alerts, but you can turn down their volume, which effectively
disables the audio alert (note that if you have vibrating alerts on,
you'll still get vibration when an incoming SMS arrives):
Menu->Setup->Tones/Alerts->Volume->Messages
turn down the volume all the way.
Here's that thread: http://www.club-siemens.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=32583
I hope to add more to this as I
collect ideas from other users...