Google and SMS

I have been researching SMS technology for the past 4-5 weeks. Several people local to my community here in Boston have received fake SMS messages from outside the country, so I my inquisitive mind decided to research the technology. Little to say, SMS is a simple gateway service between service providers. One thing I came across was a very neat service provided by Google. Google SMS is searching the web via SMS messaging. I could list examples, but why not try it for yourself?

Go ahead, yank out your cell phone, and text message the following Google SMS number: 46645 in the body of the message put in: pizza 02139

This actually corresponds to pizza locations in my area of Cambridge Mass. You should get listings SMS'd back to you. A very neat idea I will be using on my new Sidekick all the time. There are other tricks for Google SMS listed here.

SPF - Some Interesting Stats

Browsing around the web I found some great SPF stats for how many ISPs are adding SPF to their DNS records. For more information, see my previous post.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – What is it and how does it work?

In simple terms, SPF makes it possible to stop annoying forged emails from your domain. It is not Sun Protection Factor and can't be rubbed on your body to protect you from any UV...its interesting to speak to non-admins about SPF, they really start getting the wrong idea!

Companies and individuals, especially bloggers, that publish their own email addresses on their website are always forged. Email harvesters everywhere, screen scrape email addresses from websites to send spam to. However, SPF will not solve the problem of SPAM and sending email to legitimate addresses. What SPF stops is sending email on your behalf from unauthorized email servers.

For example, lets say an email forger knows that there is an email address called jack@rjsNetworks.com. He could find this from purchasing an extensive list of junk email repositories or he could acquire it from our website since “Jack” is our CEO. The forger sets up an email server at his home and starts to send email to Anthony@gmail.com. This type of forging is common and an old trick, I think Bill.Gates@Microsoft.com is the most commonly forged email address. Well, when gmail receives the email, a quick lookup at rjsNetworks.com’s DNS servers reveals that the SPF record only specifies two mail server IPs authenticated to send mail on behalf of the rjsNetworks.com domain name. Therefore, gmail flags the email as possible spam. More stringent controls on this policy are up to your email administrator. Testing the SPF
framework here at rjsNetworks has proved to be successful, only if we can encourage the rest of the ISP and admins to publish their records now…

All in all, this will not eliminate SPAM. What it will do is eliminate email forgers from using your email address. A self checking validation system that works better than the registered snail mail and not too difficult to setup either.

Some useful links:

www.DNSreport.com
O'Reilly Network: SPF Not Poisonous to Phish