Link: Marketonomy: Mobile Marketing Mindlessness.
Christopher Kenton of Marketonomy lays into the operators and the Mobile Marketing Association about the subject of text spam.
Text spam used to be a huge issue in the United Kingdom — you used to be able to send text messages for one or two pence each via India and have them delivered, often 24 hours later, to UK handsets. This extremely cheap route into the country was finally ‘plugged’ by the operators a few years ago (from memory). So, in the UK, if you want to send a message, you generally have to do it at market rates — which begins to get quite prohibitive. Doesn’t stop the determined few. However, the recipient doesn’t pay to receive messages.
Completely the opposite in North America depending on what service plan you’ve got and whether the ‘spammer’ (‘marketer’) is routing messages via SMS gateways or via the carrier’s email-to-handset gateway. Generally speaking you pay to receive messages sent to yournumber@verizon.net for example.
Ergo I think Christopher’s comments are well founded. Read on here!
This is the kind of thing that just drives me insane–that proves to me just how stupid and short-sighted businesses and marketers can be, or worse, how cynical.
I don’t want to start sounding like a perpetual Orange basher (umm) but…
Orange give a free e-mail -> SMS gateway to all subscribers (even PAYG).
You can sign up at orange.net for a username@orange.net address and have e-mail notifications sent to your phone by SMS for free… but I wouldn’t bother.
You see, somehow (I have a few theories how) after setting up a brand new orange.net username my orange.net account (and by proxy, my SMS inbox) was flooded with spam.
Orange offer no apparent spam protection and it really is a little fishy that so much spam appears so soon after the creation of a brand new account (again, multiple theories for how this happens).
I have the exact same suspicious. I too activated a free orange.net email address with sms email alerts. I was really hoping to use this email purely for important emails that need to be dealt with. All I’ve had is an average 10 spam emails/txts at all hours of the day and night. I’m going to have to use a white list on this account because otherwise the account is completely useless.
I’m starting to think that Orange are just a complete joke of a network.