Spit will be worse than spam

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 06/13/2008 - 06:24

Spit (Spam over internet telephony) may be worse than spam, according to this article. As more and more businesses and people make the switch to VoIP telephone services like Vonage, the spammers are gearing up for the mother of all dinnertime sales call efforts. But wherease the Do Not Call list mandated by Congress managed to get those annoying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sales calls under control, Spit will be coming from servers in China, Nigeria, and other lawless areas of the globe, beyond the reach of U.S regulators.

While spam can be filtered at the mail server, before you ever have to see it, spit is just going to make your phone ring. Researchers are already trying to develop methods to try to combat it, but the end result will be to make VoIP services cost more as we all pay for anti-spit services. As one example of how these costs affect prices, Design Nine's cost of mail service is effectively doubled when the spam filtering service we use is added in. Email is still a bargain, but costs more than it needs to because of spam.