Block the 1-410-100 messages

@sandblaster : “The real issue is censorship”. WHAT?  Letting recipients reject sms based on THEIR OWN filter criteria, to protect themselves from phishing scams has NOTHING to do with censorship!  Unless you’re the spammer being filtered out.  Nobody’s talking about the carrier deciding what to filter!

Letting recipients reject sms based on THEIR OWN filter criteria, to protect themselves from phishing scams has NOTHING to do with censorship!

Nobody’s talking about the carrier deciding what to filter!

@kohlenberger868389 No argument there. I’m talking about the carrier deciding what is delivered and what isn’t. The end user can reject anything they want. Now if the carriers were to provide a way to set such a filter, no problem. The carrier just can’t arbitrarily decide what it lets through. Maybe you weren’t talking about the carrier deciding what to filter but many others of those complaining were.

@TiredOfSpamAndLackOfInnovation Stir/shaken is about spoofing numbers on calls. Texts via email doesn’t involve any number spoofing and texts that come from actual phone numbers I was under the impression can’t be spoofed. That’s why spammers use email.

@sandblaster : “Now if the carriers were to provide a way to set such a filter, no problem.”  The email-to-sms gateway is under the control of the carrier, since it accesses a recipient phone number database.  Also, gateway code can see the originator’s email address and message content.  So what’s needed is a new db table to store user supplied filters, which gateway code would  access to apply any filters to the message & sender.  Plus the carrier would supply software allowing recipient users to compose or select among predefined filters.  (Maybe this filter selector can be added to AT&T’s Call Protect or other stand-alone app?)  Comcast email, for example, offers such a tool for email filtering.  This new functionality must of course be validated against security and data loss risks, but I’m guessing it’s less onerous than FDA-regulated code I developed.

A nice touch would be an option for the gateway to “bounce” or reject the message back to the sender’s email, indicating that the phone number is invalid.  Comcast email provides this option.

Reporting back that Article 446389 appears to be working for me with not a single 410 spam text in over a week. They were coming through daily before. Haven’t had any issues missing communications with ‘email to SMS’ disabled. 

I was able to block these messages by going to message blocking and clicking on message filter and entering common words like FRM: and SUBJ.. hope this helps anyone else having this issue!!

I’ve been receiving very graphic & offensive pornographic text messages & e-mails for a while now, & I have tried calling but the hold time is so long that have to hang up without talking to anyone. I’ve been with AT&T for many years & have all of my services through them. This is unacceptable! I don’t want this filth on my phone. I need to know what can be done about this. 

Thank You

Patricia

(Edited to remove personal information)

OK, so this has been working fabulously for about a month, but recently I noticed I wasn't getting 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) texts for the USPS. After thinking about it a bit, I thought that maybe it was due to my having had ATT Advanced Tech Support (ATS) disable email to SMS, sighting Article 446389. Though most other popular services I tested when I first had it set up seemed to keep working without issue, this is the first one I wasn't getting 2FA challenges from. While on hold with ATT, which was NOT as easy as it was the first time getting through to ATS (multiple disconnects and confused support reps), I received a SPAM text and was able to log in to USPS and get the 2FA handshake. I assumed with all the back and forth with ATT, a rep had enabled email to SMS on my account again. But, after finally getting to a cogent support rep, I was able to confirm that email to SMS was still being blocked on my account and had not been changed recently. So I can only assume that USPS had an issue on their end (it is the holidays after all) and that the SPAM msg I got (not a 410 text) was a coincidence. I don't know if that helps anyone, but thought I'd share. 

Takeaway? Before jumping through hoops to disable blocking of email to SMS, if you have it set up already, give it some time. It may be that the service you were having issues with (in this case USPS) is temporarily down.

I just moved over from T-Mobile and I REGRET It. The service is slower and I get spam texts ALL DAY (all the lines I moved over do). Why ATT....why 

Found this - turns out that ATT is weak on blocking spam compared to other carriers, try installing bouncer

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/ptxigo/significant_increase_in_spam_texts_after_i/