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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

As an iMessage user, I'm happy with a closed ecosystem. I know that's a controversial opinion.

I have dozens of channels of communication, and iMessage is the only one I don't get spam on. I really, really like that. Anyone without iMessage can still contact me the same way, via SMS, and they're all grouped in the same place. But I love that in 10+ years of using iMessage, I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

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I, unfortunately, have sent spam messages via iMessage a long time ago. I did it by faking a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to an iPhone and starts typing out phone numbers and addresses fed from a computer. I did it to mass-send a message to about a couple hundred people.

That’s decent rate limiting.

Desktop macs have i message too, so a determined spammer could just make a bunch of mac vms. Getting a valid serial with an unconfirmed purchase date is a massive pain, though.

It worked for me as soon as I upgraded my Hackintosh to Catalina. I had an invalid serial number and board ID. Not sure why it suddenly worked.

Interesting, go figure. Maybe it's something about the upgrade process? I made a fresh one on catalina and had a mess of a time getting it to work.

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam?

> I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

I didn't mean to imply that; I meant to explicitly say that.

... which appears to be explicitly incorrect.

Close enough to zero that for our purposes, we can safely round down to it.

If M is the set of all imessage users and S is "has received a blue dot spam message", then:

gkoberger said:

∃m∈M ¬S(m)

then mmlgr said pardon me, but:

∃m∈M S(m)

and then you were like:

∃m∈M S(m)≡¬∃m∈M ¬S(m)

but I've got to tell you:

∃m∈M S(m)≡¬∀m∈M ¬S(m)

∃m∈M ¬S(m)≡¬∀m∈M S(m)

∃m∈M S(m)≢∀m∈M S(m)

I would have been able to read this in school. Now I only know what it means from context.

It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage, where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly ban any spamming devices), and software hacks to be exploited by spammers are either hard to come by or non-existant, and can quickly be patched by Apple

Again, not saying spam on iMessage is impossible, but it's clearly very difficult given the relative lack of spammers on the platform.

I thought Facebook Messenger was very strict about assigning page-specific user IDs to avoid this. Last I checked there was no way to send a message to a Facebook user using their profile ID.

Facebook Messenger (and similar) can be spammed through UI interaction automation (on Android) or even manually with cheap labor in third-world countries.

iMessage is more resistant to this attack because the device is your credentials to the network (instead of an account) which makes such an attack very expensive if you need to replace banned iPhones every day.

I’ve actually seen spam on iMessage (a friend’s Apple account was compromised and she started seeing the spam messages sent by someone else thanks to iMessages’s iCloud sync) but I’m not too concerned because I assume the offending devices will be banned relatively quickly.

How does it matter if the spam message is blue or green when it's going to the same app? I get the most amount of SMS spam on iMessage BY FAR. Have never seen one on WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.

> SMS spam

That's just SMS though - unless you mean blue bubbles being spam. I haven't received any of those, but if you do there's always a "report spam" link at the top of the conversation for senders you've never seen before.

That was my point with "when it's going to the same app". Messages from SMS and iMessage both show up in the same "Messages" app, and are indistinguishable from each other. So it doesn't matter if you're getting spam only from SMS when the app is still lighting up all the time.

My point is that this isn't exclusive to iOS; if you move to Android, that SMS spam isn't going away. Unless you can mute Android's SMS app because you receive 0 legitimate SMS messages, you'll be dealing with the same problem.

Is there a chance you publicly reveal your other IM contacts? Because as it stands I pretty much never get spam on Instagram, Whatsapp, Line, nor Messenger (FB). I don't even get spam in the "Message Requests" of FB messenger.

The biggest problems are email and phone, which are the two most open systems. I get a decent amount on the ones you listed, but it's not as bad. A few messages a week on each. Most of those have ads, though, too. Different issue, but same problem... a cheap, unavoidable way to force me to see your message. iMessage is the only inbox I feel like I control. No spam, no ads, just friends.

(Not the point, but I'm looking at my Instapainting as we speak! One of my favorite things I own.)

I get spam all the time on Instagram. Even the private account of the two that I have constantly winds up in random group spam messages. I'm assuming some spammers use scripts or other code to just comb through tons of high-profile account pages' follower lists and then randomly groups userid's to send mass messages to. It's completely frustrating.

The thing I wonder about iMessages, and Apple, is how I don't get spammed at all with iMessages when I have my ID linked to my normal email addresses, which do get normal email spam. You'd think spammers that do email spam would also be smart enough to try sending to iMessage accounts using those email addresses. But I'm guessing it's a limitation on the sender-side vs. the client side and maybe it's not easy to do due to how iMessages is such a closed-system.

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