Idea: SMS spam detection based on keywords and unknown sender

asked 2013-12-31 15:45:28 +0200

Milhouse gravatar image

updated 2014-01-10 21:00:28 +0200

lk gravatar image

For the past few months I've been receiving - for some unknown reason - about 10-15 text messages a day from money loan companies here in the UK for someone called "Khalid", which is not my name, nor do I know anyone with that name.

Every message includes a reference to "Khalid", plus "cash", "money" or "loan", and sometimes a url.

Needless to say, none of the senders are in my contacts list.

It occurs to me that it would be a really nice feature on the Jolla to be able to quarantine these SMS messages by having them marked as Spam and therefore not alerting me each and every time one is received.

As the sender is not in my contacts list, it should be possible to quickly identify these "unknown sender" messages as spam by filtering on user defined keywords - in my particular case: any mention of "khalid" and any one of "money", "cash" or "loan", or if the message contains a url.

I suppose this kind of spam detection may be possible to achieve with an app (assuming an app is able to hook into the inbound SMS processing and prevent alerts, then mark messages as spam etc.), but I don't know of any other mobile OS that has this type of functionality built-in as standard, and which could (IMHO) be a win for Jolla and Sailfish (not to mention, us users).

Anyone who has to suffer spam text messages on an ongoing and daily basis would certainly appreciate it!

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Comments

@Milhouse - Maybe we should merge our topics: https://together.jolla.com/question/7614/blocklist-for-phone-calls-and-sms/

Sailor ( 2013-12-31 16:36:50 +0200 )edit

I don't mind if they're merged, although I'd say they're not identical requests. Perhaps your request could be viewed as a subset of this request (ie. filtering unknown senders, even without keywords). I suppose another option might be to whitelist unknown senders based on keyword? Obviously this request is only about SMS, and not phone calls.

Perhaps leaving them as two separate requests would be best, then Jolla can cherry pick from both (if they see fit to do so!)

Milhouse ( 2013-12-31 16:44:41 +0200 )edit

But I think we gain more votes if we put things together.

Sailor ( 2013-12-31 16:45:19 +0200 )edit

@Milhouse - I made a reference in my request for yours.

Sailor ( 2013-12-31 16:47:05 +0200 )edit

I think it might be best to keep ideas as simple as possible (and addressing/resolving minimal issues) so that any votes received are clear and unambiguous. For instance I might want to filter SMS but I may not want to block phone calls - if I vote, I'm voting for SMS filtering AND phone call blocking (so I won't actually vote at all).

Milhouse ( 2013-12-31 16:49:28 +0200 )edit