--- title: "SMSpam" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/21/smspam.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/21/smspam.html" published: "2004-04-21T16:41:00" updated: "2004-04-21T16:41:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "It is final. SMS is far more annoying than regular email spam. How so? Here's a little story. A couple of months ago my wife and me went to a disco club (if you're from israel, it was the TLV - be warned!). All was fine…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # SMSpam By Roy Osherove April 21, 2004 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published April 21, 2004; technical details may be outdated. It is final. SMS is **far** more annoying than regular email spam. How so? Here's a little story. A couple of months ago my wife and me went to a disco club (if you're from israel, it was the TLV - be warned!). All was fine and dandy and we had a lot of fun. The week after that, on thursday evening, my cell phone starts beeping like crazy. I was never much into beeping, even my machine is on mute most of the time, so this was pretty annoying. It seems that someone decided to send me an SMS message to my cell phone. Now, here's the really annoying part about getting an SMS on my phone(samsung). This particular model **will beep every minute until you actually read the message**. No way around that. I s\*it you not. So, after picking up the phone, unlocking it by - pressing “#” for 3 seconds (sigh), - going to menu, “read messages”(sigh) - and waiting a second for the message list to load (sigh), - clicking on the “new” sign and waiting another second (sigh) I finally got to read the important text that my phone wanted so much to tell me about - it was an SMS message from the TLV, telling me I should really attend their party the next day, because DJ so and so will be there. Needless to say I was pissed. How the hell did they get my number? Then I remembered that on that evening we went dancing, we filled out a membership form with my details, including cell phone. ugh. What was I thinking?? I dimissed the message and returned to my day job, not before deleting it by - going to “messages”, - ”last Message”, - ”Delete”, - ”Confirm”, - ”Deleted” (sigh, another 5 seconds down the drain).  the next week I get another message from them, so I call them up and ask to be removed. Of course I wasn't, and the next week I got another SMS. not only that, I got **another different** SMS, from a **different** club, which appereantly is trading phone numbers (like any common spammer trades emails) with the TLV. aaarrrggg! **Conclusion** - SMS is the next spam medium. beware. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Apr 21, 2004 ### [Taiwan is closer than I thought](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/21/taiwan-is-closer-than-i-thought.html) - Apr 21, 2004 ### [Simple and addicting game](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/21/simple-and-addicting-game.html) - Apr 15, 2004 ### [The art of folding](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/15/the-art-of-folding.html) - Apr 15, 2004 ### [Getting creative with the windows sound recorder](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/15/getting-creative-with-the-windows-sound-recorder.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/