Rogers Cellular is starting to piss me off again. I have had SMS service with them forever, or at least 7-8 years now. In this time I have used Nagios or other sysadmin notification scripts to buzz me via email-to-sms when servers were experiencing heartburn etc.
Other than a few self-inflicted incidents where Nagios sent 100-200 messages at once, it’s been working fairly well.
Over the last few years most of my sms has been direct sms to/from my wife’s phone, and not so much with Nagios etc. Work tends to have their own ‘pager’ phone that we use for server alerts now.
Over the last 6 to 9 months, I have been getting occasional email spam on my phone, coming thru the email-sms gateway. Over the last month it’s gotten worse on a daily basis. To the point where I was getting maybe 1-2 spam per hour at peaks and 1 every 2 hours in the troughs.
Most annoying to have the phone beep at 3am and then pester me ever few min to look at it until I started leaving the phone off and/or downstairs for the night.
I contacted Rogers to ask about this and was told I could go to the following website for self service on this topic. Fair enough.
http://www.shoprogers.com/store/wireless/services/email/emailtxt_commands.asp?
On that site I found that it is possible to block specific email addresses or entire domains, and also that I could whitelist specific addresses or domains.
Sounds good, right? All I have to do is block everything and then whitelist just the people / machines I want to be able to get thru to me via email-sms….
Not so fast. There is NO way to do just that. I can only block at the domain level at best. Spam spoofs the sender address so this is absolutely useless for my purposes.
So, I read further and found there is a way to turn off email-to-sms completely. OK, not so great but since my sms use is mostly sms-to-sms it’s acceptable.
I turn off email-to-sms service for my phone.
3am, I get a spam. Rogers does NOT forward it to my phone.
How do I know I got a spam if Rogers did not forward it?
ROGERS SENT ME AN SMS AT 3 AM TELLING ME I HAD An EMAIL BUT WAS NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE EMAIL-TO-SMS GATEWAY.
Missing the point aren’t they?
When I says ‘whoa’, I means ‘WHOA!’. Stupid dragon. I mean mule. I mean Rogers.
Currently embroiled in battle with Rogers technical support trying to get this turned off permanently. If they can’t resolve this to my satisfaction I may move to another provider.
Really would rather not though, since Rogers is/was affiliated with AT&T and because of that they are the ones who will likely have the Apple iPhone in Canada first. Perhaps this summer, maybe later in the fall.
Bastards. Incompetents. Bah.
Maybe I don’t need a phone and can just get on with my career goal of becoming a goat herder on the siberian steppes.
Well at least now you have number portability if you do decide to switch…
camz
March 19th, 2007
I’ve sent a few test emails and the email-to-sms seems to be genuinely stopped at the moment. Good….
Number portability. Not quite fully baked yet, go look it up on digitalhome.ca The carriers only had to enable port-out
(give the number up) for now, and port-in isn’t required until this fall.
trever
March 21st, 2007
If it’s any consolation, I’ve been having the exact same battle. I just spent 25 mins on the phone, including being escalated to “the office of the president” (code words for the uber complaint handler). Short answer: no fix, but I made sure they logged the complaint as a bug. Yvette (the voice on the other end) said they review the list every three months.
Bah.
p^2
April 3rd, 2007