14 DAY TRIAL // If you are tired of all that e-mail junk or text messages that you receive everyday on your mobile phone (I live in Romania and I thought I was safe, at least on my mobile, but I keep receiving all kind of text message offers from a store I never even visited in my life), then Verizon Wireless is the carrier for you. If you are their customer you must have noticed that they are doing their best to keep you spam free, as free as possible that is.
For example, over the last few months, Verizon has filled in the US District Court in Trenton NJ a few lawsuits against people or companies that harass the carrier's customers with text messages that contain every type of promotion or information you can think of, related of course to their business. These are lawsuits filled against parties that sent different number of text messages to the Verizon customers that contained advertising messages that we, the rest of the world that get them, call spam.
In the case of 30.000 text messages promoting various websites having reached the Verizon users, in another one filed on September 29th a flood of 550.000 spam messages arrived mostly on the phones of New York Verizon users and, the best of them all, a lawsuit filed in June 2006 concerning more than 1.1 million text messages containing discount prescription medication.
Steve Zipperstein, vice president and general counsel of Verizon Wireless, said that "these lawsuits are just a small part of our company's efforts to stop unwanted messages from reaching our customers' handsets. Verizon Wireless remains committed to defending the strong wall of customer privacy we've built over the years through our network practices and our industry leading pro-consumer policies."
If you want to set your own rules for blocking messages, you can use the MyTXT service provided by Verizon on www.vtext.com and by choosing the TXT blocking option, you can specify if you want to block all messages that arrive from the Internet or only certain addresses of your choice.
There is another choice though: if you really, really hate the guys that deliver all this spam to your mobile (or even on your email account) you can hope they all get hit by a bus! At the same time, in such a manner that there won't be any wasted busses during this action that all the world will have a profit from. Also that would be a bus driven not by a normal guy like us that has to delete every day his "spam", but by a spammer to make it a family meeting of their own. Maybe someone up there loves us and will listen to us and make our hopes come true (you can even try to put this wish in your Santa Claus letter if you think this will work better).
Long live busses I say!