A team of students and professors at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi have developed a mobile software that might just put an effective stop to those inane inundations of spam SMS our phones are all subjected to. Called SMSAssassin, the software acts like a spam filter for your inbox, and in doing so, also protects your phone from possible malicious attachments.
With no other solutions, neither carrier nor government based, actually doing a comprehensive job of blocking such spam messages, the need for such a software is strong as ever. SMSAssassin apparently uses Bayesian techniques and crowd-sourced blacklisting to filter spam. Before developing SMSAssassin, the team at IIIT was researching what SMSes do users consider as spam, and how the criteria differed between individuals and genders.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]According to one of the researchers, SMSAsssasin is in a “prototype stage,” and a “full-fledged system” is being developed for a launch in the near future. The phone will work on a variety of mid-range phones apparently, and currently, apart from a much-developed Symbian version, Windows Phone 7 and Android versions are also in the pipeline.
While waiting for its release, you could contribute to the blacklisting process, by visiting the SMSAssassin Facebook page, where you are instructed to forward your spam messages to 91 8826068429. While many of us would do this without an incentive, the team has posted one anyways – gifts worth Rs. 300 to the person who sends the most messages, chosen once every 15 days.
Do also check out a PDF on SMSAssassin written by the team for more details.