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Comment by simfree | Hacker News Reader

Another one bites the dust.

MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.

Since the FCC abdicated their regulatory power over texting during the first Trump administration under Ajit Pai, T-Mobile, AT&T & Verizon Wireless formed a cartel called The Campaign Registry which has run amok extorting data and cash out of businesses just to be allowed to go through a slow approval process.

Nominally, this was to reduce spam texts, but the vast majority of spam texts are internal to the Mobile Network Operators these days.

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I think it's a little overstated to call tcr a cartel. Yes, it's a process, but it's gotten a lot better over the last 18 months.

People have been complaining about spam text for a long time. There aren't too many folks out there clamouring for anyone to be able to send them an SMS via email gateway.

For the past decade I've been shocked that email to sms was still allowed. sure, there are some legitimate organizations that have been using this route to avoid cost. But the whole idea is that if it's not worth 1 penny to send this message, then sms probably isn't the right channel.

Where do you get the data about spam texts being internal to MNOs these days? I keep track of the ones I receive and they're almost all going through third party companies that are themselves sending through Twilio, Bandwidth, Sinch, etc. This makes perfect sense to me given what I know of the market and how spammers operate.

As a result there always be a company accepting messages with false sender identity so scammers can operate easily...

How do you track and save these numbers? Manually or programmatically?

Manually. My MNO does pretty aggressive blocking, so I only have about 1/week to deal with. That's low enough that I report them manually rather than try to automate the constantly changing reporting process or deal with app development. The response is almost always some variation on "We've forwarded your report to the network we received it from".

I don't really get SMS/MMS. It made tons of sense in the 90s when we were all on our little Nokia.

Now, every device is internet connected. Email arrives in an instant. Whatsapp/Viber/FB Messenger exist and all provide a way better experience. RCS, 2 decades late, is like an april fools joke. Why are we still using this?

Can you elaborate a bit more on the similarity between MMS and email? I'm curious to know how similar. Is there an MMS RFC?

Telco has so, so, so, so many obscure and complicated technical specifications. They love their acronyms...

https://www.openmobilealliance.org/specifications/

Is probably a decent place to start

> MMS and email use the same protocol with minor differences under the hood.

MMS uses SMTP "with minor differences"? I've never heard that.

It's an incorrect statement. An MMS is delivered by sending an SMS to the recipient phone and the phone fetching the message via http. Very unlike SMTP.

Almost all of my spam messages are MMS text messages from throwaway mobile numbers.

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