12 ms·

Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless.

Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless. I barely bother to check them anymore, because for every 1 legitimate message I get, there are dozens of spam ones. > I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now. I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me. I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.

ianai 5y ago
Maybe it’s time for a firewall for the phone/text systems?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  If I understand correctly, SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to be this.
Forricide 5y ago
> email Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider). The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Even with siloing and owning your own domain... It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
- beckingz 5y ago
  Fastmail allows you to crate unlimited email aliases that forward to your main domain. I'm a happy customer.
  - Fwirt 5y ago
    There are also free services that do this, like ImprovMX.
  - site-packages1 5y ago
    Fastmail is amazing. I like it so much I started paying for the three years in advance plan.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I used to use separate emails for orders, newsletters, etc. But what I found was that the separate email effectively became a dev/null. Gmail does a good enough job of filtering and tagging that I get a mostly clean primary inbox without effectively trashing everything else that I might want to look at once in a while, e.g. reservation confirmations.
macksd 5y ago
I don't think the physical mail problem gets talked about enough. Maybe it varies - because I actually don't have much of a problem with spam text messages myself - but one of the bigger chunks of my HOA bill lately is the cost of the daily emptying of a large trash receptacle by the mail boxes, because everyone opens their box and immediately dumps 90% of that crap into a shared trash can. What a waste.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I'm my HOA president right now and something that infuriated me is a Texas law stating we have to notify all residents of actions by mail. Nobody reads their mail and nobody should. We're a block of 6 townhouses and my farthest neighbor is 40 feet away. I see these people everyday and can just tell them, yet we're forced to send out a bunch of useless mail destined to be thrown away. We first noticed this when we saw a category of charge from the property manager related to mail. None of us want mail, but the state of Texas forces us to receive it anyway. They also sell contact info to marketers when you apply for a driver's license, so ever since they passed the law saying you can't vote with an out of state ID, that increased my spam levels, too.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    So how in general should people be notified of official actions/activities? Just hope they find out somehow? It's not like most people read some local newspaper any longer.
    - sio8ohPi 5y ago
      Email. But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I don't consider email a reliable/robust official notification mechanism. People have various emails, may or may not check a given email address, stuff gets filtered to spam, etc. It's almost certainly more trustworthy than it was a number of years back but if you want to send me an important notification, I want it to be first class mail.
brimble 5y ago
The only non-work communication channel I use that has a better than 50% SNR is WhatsApp. And that's been getting worse lately—I think I've had about ten spam messages on that in years and years of use, and all but one's been in the last ~3 weeks. Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.
- nradov 5y ago
  WhatsApp spam has been getting a lot worse in the past few months. I keep getting messages from foreign phone numbers using stock profile photos of attractive young women. I report them but they just come back with a different number.
tomrod 5y ago
Ugh, I wish. OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails. No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Or "what is your name"? Seems like spam is always trying to hide the actual identity of the sender. "This is Jack from the warranty department"? Yeah, sure you are. Whose warranty department? They won't get specific because they know that if they do, I'll know that I don't know these people. They're trying to pretend that they're someone that I already have a relationship with, but in doing so they get vague. And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know. I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.
nostrademons 5y ago
Or just raise the price on communications, or let recipients set a price on being contacted. Charge $1/text, which the sender gets back if the recipient replies. This would very quickly make most spam uneconomical, since the expected returns wouldn't exceed the cost to send the messages. Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.
bondant 5y ago
In France people put a sticker on the mailbox which says "Pas de publicité, merci" (No advertisement, thanks). It really decreased the number of ads I have received (although I still receive one from time to time). Maybe you could try something similar.

ianai 5y ago

Maybe it’s time for a firewall for the phone/text systems?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
If I understand correctly, SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to be this.

Forricide 5y ago

> email Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider). The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.

noasaservice 5y ago
Even with siloing and owning your own domain... It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
beckingz 5y ago
Fastmail allows you to crate unlimited email aliases that forward to your main domain. I'm a happy customer.
- Fwirt 5y ago
  There are also free services that do this, like ImprovMX.
- site-packages1 5y ago
  Fastmail is amazing. I like it so much I started paying for the three years in advance plan.
ghaff 5y ago
I used to use separate emails for orders, newsletters, etc. But what I found was that the separate email effectively became a dev/null. Gmail does a good enough job of filtering and tagging that I get a mostly clean primary inbox without effectively trashing everything else that I might want to look at once in a while, e.g. reservation confirmations.

macksd 5y ago

I don't think the physical mail problem gets talked about enough. Maybe it varies - because I actually don't have much of a problem with spam text messages myself - but one of the bigger chunks of my HOA bill lately is the cost of the daily emptying of a large trash receptacle by the mail boxes, because everyone opens their box and immediately dumps 90% of that crap into a shared trash can. What a waste.

nonameiguess 5y ago
I'm my HOA president right now and something that infuriated me is a Texas law stating we have to notify all residents of actions by mail. Nobody reads their mail and nobody should. We're a block of 6 townhouses and my farthest neighbor is 40 feet away. I see these people everyday and can just tell them, yet we're forced to send out a bunch of useless mail destined to be thrown away. We first noticed this when we saw a category of charge from the property manager related to mail. None of us want mail, but the state of Texas forces us to receive it anyway. They also sell contact info to marketers when you apply for a driver's license, so ever since they passed the law saying you can't vote with an out of state ID, that increased my spam levels, too.
- ghaff 5y ago
  So how in general should people be notified of official actions/activities? Just hope they find out somehow? It's not like most people read some local newspaper any longer.
  - sio8ohPi 5y ago
    Email. But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I don't consider email a reliable/robust official notification mechanism. People have various emails, may or may not check a given email address, stuff gets filtered to spam, etc. It's almost certainly more trustworthy than it was a number of years back but if you want to send me an important notification, I want it to be first class mail.

brimble 5y ago

The only non-work communication channel I use that has a better than 50% SNR is WhatsApp. And that's been getting worse lately—I think I've had about ten spam messages on that in years and years of use, and all but one's been in the last ~3 weeks. Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.

nradov 5y ago
WhatsApp spam has been getting a lot worse in the past few months. I keep getting messages from foreign phone numbers using stock profile photos of attractive young women. I report them but they just come back with a different number.

tomrod 5y ago

Ugh, I wish. OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails. No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Or "what is your name"? Seems like spam is always trying to hide the actual identity of the sender. "This is Jack from the warranty department"? Yeah, sure you are. Whose warranty department? They won't get specific because they know that if they do, I'll know that I don't know these people. They're trying to pretend that they're someone that I already have a relationship with, but in doing so they get vague. And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know. I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.

nostrademons 5y ago

Or just raise the price on communications, or let recipients set a price on being contacted. Charge $1/text, which the sender gets back if the recipient replies. This would very quickly make most spam uneconomical, since the expected returns wouldn't exceed the cost to send the messages. Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.

bondant 5y ago

In France people put a sticker on the mailbox which says "Pas de publicité, merci" (No advertisement, thanks). It really decreased the number of ads I have received (although I still receive one from time to time). Maybe you could try something similar.