Verizon Wireless Text Messaging Spam

Verizon Wireless reaps significant profits from spam messages to cell phones, and offers grossly inadequate tools for fighting spam.

Currently Verizon only offers an opt-out approach to control spam (blacklisting). This method is laughable, as a single user is unlikely to see a spammer repeatedly use the same address.

Verizon's utter lack of support for vtext.com customers can easily lead one to believe that they are happy to profit from the spam messages. In order to responsibly serve their customers, Verizon Wireless needs to offer basic tools for spam management. Such tools are easily and cheaply implemented, and should represent no significant new cost to Verizon Wireless. These should include:

1. Give users the option of an opt-in approach for controlling spam. That is, users should have the ability to provide a list of addresses, domains, and patterns, which are allowed to send messages to their cell phone. A large number of addresses, domains, and patterns should be allowed.

2. Provide the option of general spam filtering for their email to cell phone gateway. Spam filtering is not perfect, but it is relatively mature technology, and fairly straightforward to drop in any of several available packages. (This must be optional, as some applications would prefer to see occasional spam rather than risk a missed message.)

3. Provide users with customer service, where they can report spam, and be credited for messages which are easily demonstrated to be spam.

We therefore petition Verizon Wireless to end their shameful spam profiteering, and provide the minimum set of tools required to manage spam text messages.