At least 10% of the business calls I receive do end up getting flagged as 'Suspected Spam' - so these would go completely unaddressed which isn't good.
[snip]
Alas, where the voice calls are falling off, the spam text messages from crap like"4aDEcv45tgYHKxx78@amazon-notifs.io" have increased to about once per day. How those aren't immediately flagged as spam is beyond me.
Yup, that's part of the problem with SHAKEN. Like I said, there's
legitimate usage for Caller ID spoofing. It's a feature for larger PBXes with places like hospitals and call centers, where a central number is preferred for call-in as opposed to providing the direct lines to people... and I've seen and used it in smaller business settings as well, where people don't want to hand out their cellphone number, but need to call others from the "business" number via VOIP. All STIR/SHAKEN has effectively done is flag legitimate CID spoofing from legitimate businesses as "suspected spam callers" while doing little to curb and flag the
actual robocallers.
The TRACED Act legislation, like the TCPA, although intended to be good natured as it was, was technologically clueless and informed by telecom industry lobbyists who wanted to pass the buck on responsibility because our legislators are professional politicians now, and have little to no real world experience with the very subjects they're writing law about. (This is why any day that this sort of topic goes by, that I don't deeply miss Al Franken in the Senate. He was the first person on Capital Hill that I remember in my lifetime, that actually had the knowledge and teeth to push back against Silicon Valley; the Telecom, Cable, and Entertainment industries; and the deep pocket FCC muppets like Ajit Pai.)
Unfortunately, too, is the SMS problem. SMS has had email gateways for years, and most people don't actually know this. But again, the TCPA and TRACED have no teeth or penalties for the
common carriers to be held accountable for not taking steps to mitigate this stuff, only the bad actors
abusing the network... I mean, the telecoms get paid the same for call connection and termination and SMS relay and delivery. There's literally no incentive for the telecoms to fight against it, because stopping it takes money out of
their pockets. They don't care if a significant portion of that money made is from illegitimate businesses abusing the network, 'cause
money, baby! Gotta keep you shareholders happy with your 7% FIRE investment returns, because line must
always go up. (Hello, unintended consequence! Funny running into you here.)
Maybe folks might be wise to keep this lesson in mind next time they complain about how hard it is to find quality made goods at an affordable price anymore, or the issues with planned obsolescence with technology and appliances, or SAAS models of software, while sitting on enough invested money to no longer work. But then, you got yours already, you'll just adapt and budget accordingly... and the prols can just eat cake. You've totally broken out of the consumer sukka cycle. Totally.
But, I digress. SMS spamming, and SMS/MMS email gateways. Long ago, it was decided that a useful feature would be to attach email gateways to the PSTN specifically for the new-fangled SMS technology on the cellular network. Like, back in the day, carriers like AT&T or Sprint had gone so far as to have a dedicated web page where you could type in the phone number you wanted to send a text message to, and send it! For free! (Suddenly, the old 25¢/SMS received or $10 SMS package add-on with cell phone bills makes
even more sense for reasons to bill for a service specifically designed to utilize quiet chunks of unused airtime on the GSM signalling paths. Yup, they used what was effectively a free service to them to print money off of your usage.) By the way,
those gateways still exist, and trivially cheaply sent email that rarely has to fight against SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication for delivery with spoofed headers are literally as far away from your phone as [yournumber]@[yourcarriersSMSgatewaydomain], or for those who can't visualize that, 2125551212@txt.att.net
But again, this is a useful feature with legitimate use cases. I used to use it back in the dumbphone days with email forwarding rules, and even used it with Grand Central and Google Voice. It's a legitimate feature, and it's worth keeping. It's also easily fixed to drastically cut back the sheer volume of these sorts of emails by implementing the industry standard at this point MX gateway SPF/DKIM/DMARC settings on their mail servers.
But will they do that? No, because TCPA and TRACED address the domestic
abusers with fines, not the industry enabling these problems for failing to do anything about it because they're financially awarded for literally doing nothing about it themselves to prevent it. The less they do to combat this problem, the more money they make.
So, no. This problem isn't going away, unfortunately. Because
money. Your misery is literally fueling your own retirement goals and index funds. Sorry to bear the bad news, please don't shoot the messenger.