On 2023-01-09 02:21:15 (+0800), Andrew C Aitchison via mailop wrote:
On Sun, 7 Jan 2023, John Levine via mailop wrote:
But more to the point, why do you care? The number of phones these
days that can get SMS but not email rounds to zero, so if someone
wants to send you mail, they can send you mail and don't need to fool
around with a flaky gateway.
At least one of the respondents works for a healthcare provider.
(In the UK) I get SMS reminders of hospital appointments.
This is common in other parts of the world too. In addition to
healthcare providers, banks and governments like to use SMS for all
sorts of notifications.
A push-reminder of an appointment is better than one that drops
silently into my mailbox, and if it makes a noise in my pocket rather
rhan on my desk, also good.
Surely that depends on how many of these you get on a daily basis ...
and on the fraction of those that are spam. :-)
Once upon a time SMS had a reputation for stronger security and
privacy than email. I don't know how much that reputation was
or is deserved.
The reputation for security is largely based on the belief that SS7 is
more secure than the internet.
SMS is no more private than email.
Within a given regulatory domain, SMS may be more reliable than email.
Globally though, not so much.
I think the key value proposition of SMS in 2023 is that it almost
invariably results in a notification on a mobile handset. Within a
given operator (and possibly within a given regulatory domain) SMS is
more or less instantaneous. Moreover, unlike email, SMS does not need
to be configured. In fact, it usually takes effort to configure a
mobile telephone to ignore SMS.
The only reason it doesn't get abused more is probably more to do with
the limitations on content length, and formatting, than with the
inherent security of the system.
Philip
--
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises
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