Text, Easily. Official Blog of LookNoThumbs.com, the Home of Online Texting

Online Texting Anti-spoofing Measures, and about time!

Bulk text messaging (SMS) supplier Clickatell is now preventing online texting customers from setting the Sender ID header on each outbound SMS message.

It’s a subtle change that many won’t care about or perhaps even notice. But serious online texting services like www.looknothumbs.com welcome this as an important and necessary step towards privacy, security and trust in text messaging; and one that delivers a clean blow on the chin to SMS spammers and would-be fraudsters who threaten this market.

Here’s why.

If you’ve ever opened an email and discovered it’s not what it appeared to be, you may know that you can’t always trust the From: header in email. That’s because any program that creates email messages can insert any value into that header. This is an artefact of SMTP - a protocol developed in a more innocent age but still used today to deliver most Internet email.

Text messaging doesn’t use SMTP, but the principle is the same. The sending software constructs the text message, including a Sender ID header, which is treated as the sender’s mobile number or a text identifier. This is useful because if the Sender ID matches an address book entry in the receiving phone, you might see “From: Bob Smith” rather than “From: 07123456789”.

Note: SMS spamming and spoofing have not been a huge problem in the USA. That’s partly because of limitations with U.S. network operators, and partly because SMS spamming is prosecuted as a felony in the U.S. with serious consequences for convicted offenders. However, spoofing in particular is a problem in other regions, including Europe, where bona fide applications depend on the Sender ID header as an enabler for replies.

So what’s new?

Well last month, Clickatell told customers it was dropping support for ad-hoc setting of the Sender ID header. Sender IDs now have to be pre-registered or pass stringent, auditable, security checks by Clickatell or its security-conscious customers like www.looknothumbs.com.

Why is this a good thing?

This measure eliminates spoofing because sending programs can no longer impersonate Sender IDs undetected. It also discourages spam because the message originator is easily traceable and appropriate action can be taken.

But perhaps most importantly, it discourages bad citizenship in electronic messaging culture. SMS is a cherished child of the mobile industry. It’s beloved by its users and suppliers alike for its convenience, and its seemingly limitless capacity for valuable applications. Nobody wants text messaging to suffer the fate of email, riddled with unwanted content and virtually unusable for many.

With this new measure in place, suppliers are taking the short-term risk of reduced traffic, but the pay-off will be high-quality content and long-term trust in the medium, which will fuel continued growth in this sector.

At online texting site www.looknothumbs.com, all hats are off to Clickatell for taking this initiative.