My good pal Malen was having some text message spam problems the other day, and I believe I helped him out, so I’ll post my solution here.

The situation with your cell phone is if it you didn’t know it, is that your cellphone has it’s own email address.

It differs by provider but the one for AT&T is yournumber@txt.att.net. Now this is great for those who want to get small emails (160 characters maximum) to their phone, but it also means a spammer can guess your phone’s email address pretty easy.

I’m sure AT&T and all providers do something to stop someone from massively spamming their cell phones but at times these things do leak through.

So Malen was getting text messages that contained the following words: TO:, FRM:, SUBJ:, these indicate that they definitely came from a computer and was originally an email converted to a text message.

So, to stop them via AT&T, you can do the following:

By going to www.wireless.att.com/textmessaging and selecting ‘Messaging Preferences’ on the right, AT&T customers can now setup and manage their PC-to-Mobile messaging preferences (PC2M). Once registered, customers can create an alias, block incoming messages, manage email delivery controls and setup block/allow lists.

Message Preferences manages PC-to-Mobile user preferences and not Mobile-to-Mobile messaging. It helps customers fight against unsolicited messages and other forms of spam. If you have a question, feel free to ask in our Messaging forum or place a call to Customer Care at 1-800-331-0500 (or 611 from your wireless handset).

You’ll want to find the option called “Email Delivery Control” and then “Block All Text Messages Sent As Email” and “Block All Multimedia Messages Sent As Email“

After blocking these options Malen still got another spam message almost immediately after doing it. So there is some delay between activating these settings and the settings taking effect.

Now a few days later, Malen has not received any spam messages.

He looks happy now.