Thanks for the information about reporting spam text messages, I had never heard about it. I just received some spam text the other day and ended up reporting it through the FCC, but reporting straight to your mobile operator on the phone is much nicer.
From MikeS1_VZW
We have heard our customers on this, and we have launched a new program
to help with SPAM. Take one (or several) of the SPAM messages and
forward it to 7726 (which spells SPAM). This is a new process. Once you
forward the message to 7726, you will get a reply text message asking
the identity of the SPAM sender (the "From" address in the SPAM message
you received). Once received, you will get a "Thank-you" message from
the 7726 number. We will investigate on the back end.
The messages you send to and receive from the 7726 number are free of
charge. This is a brand new program we are testing, and it just started
on 09/1/11. Please make this common practice when receiving SPAM
messages. This is not to be confused with alerts though. If you get
alerts (something you signed up for), you should reply STOP to the
message received before going the whole 7726 route.
Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.
Here's what I want: a whitelist. If I want to add you to my whitelist, I put my phone into "receiving" mode. I get your text, confirm adding you, then go back into normal mode, where texts from anyone not on the list are rejected and I don't pay for them.
Expensive, yeah. It should be free, actually; my whole gripe is that I don't want to pay to receive messages I didn't even want. It doesn't help if I have to pay not to receive them.
But it does sound useful. And if it gets mindshare, competition could make it cheaper or free.
It would be nice if phones had an option to treat text messages differently if the number isn't in your phone book. I wouldn't care about text message spam so much if it went to a spam folder and didn't alert like a regular text message.
I think you just described how Facebook handles email...
But I agree with you for the most part a distinction between known senders and unknown senders would be great. The only exception to this that I can think of personally, is for things like the Google 2-factor auth messages which appear to be sent from random numbers (in addition to being random numbers!).
ceejayoz is right about Verizon also supporting this feature (I just reported the spam message I had from the other day). Via https://community.verizonwireless.com/message/696743#696743 :