According to figures from Ferris Research, roughly 1 billion text-based spam messages will be received by subscribers during 2007, up from an estimated 800 million in 2006. Despite this, content security company Marshal says there is no cause for concern. It points out that this figure equates to just 0.67% of all text messages, compared to email spam, which Marshals TRACE threat monitoring team estimates at 83% of all email.
Marshal Director of Product Management, Bradley Anstis, believes that text message spam will never grow to epidemic proportions, because service providers will proactively block spam in a bid to meet contractual usage agreements and minimise customer churn to rival networks. He says:
“Many people worry that text message spam could become as big an issue as email spam over the next few years, but this just wont happen. For one thing, while sending email spam is free apart from the cost of the Internet connection, each text message spam costs on average 10 pence, which makes text message spamming very expensive.”
Anstis also feels that the subjective nature of spam is an issue that will come to the fore in 2007.
A text message from a marketer that I regard as interesting could be viewed by someone else as an intrusion he says. So, service providers will need not only to put in place robust anti-spam controls, but also put in place sophisticated processes to capture data on the specific opt-in programmes that individual mobile subscribers are interested in.”